September 14: Genghis Khan, Superpowers, Wisdom

In the deepest part of the woods was a stand of ferns.  I had just been reading in Donald Culross Peattie that the so-called "seed" of ferns was formerly thought to bestow the gift of invisibility on its bearer, and that Genghis Khan wore such a seed in his ring, "and by it understood the speech of birds." . . . 

Pretty cool little passage.  Dillard writing about superpowers.  Invisibility.  Understanding the language of feathers.  These few little sentences prove to me that everybody thinks about having extraordinary powers, even a Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer who can compose paragraphs that can literally, to quote Emily Dickinson, make me "feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off."

I'm not sure what superpower I would want.  Flying would be pretty cool, but limited.  Sure, I could fly across the Atlantic to have some fish and chips in London, but then I would just have to fly back and return to my normal life.  Super strength?  No thank you.  It would come in handy in the kitchen when the lid of a jar gets stuck, but who really needs to lift cars off the ground or leap tall buildings?  Invisibility would have attracted me as a teenager.  I wouldn't have minded slipping into the girls' locker room at school every once in a while.

When God offered to grant King Solomon a gift, Solomon didn't ask for great wealth or long life.  He didn't ask Yahweh to smite his enemies with syphilis or hangnails.  At the time, Solomon was really young, and he had just inherited the throne from his father, King David.  Solomon wasn't too sure he knew how to rule properly, so he asked God to grant him wisdom.  And God did.  Jehovah made Solomon the wisest person who ever lived.  (He still messed up plenty, worshiping other gods and lusting after too many women.  Wisdom and common sense are sometimes mutually exclusive.)

Despite Solomon's failings, I think wisdom would be a pretty awesome superpower.  To be able to discern the secrets of the universe like Einstein or write profound books like William Faulkner.  To be able to answer any question with truth and authority.  Everybody in Solomon's time knew he was the smartest guy around.  He would have killed on Celebrity Jeopardy.  That's my kind of superpower.

I'm teaching Intro to Film tonight.  I have to share my limited understanding of cinema.  The only saving grace is that I know quite a bit more than most of my students when it comes to movies.  Therefore, I will be Professor Solomon this evening, spreading the Gospel of Quentin Tarantino.  For a little while, anyway, I can pretend that I am the wisest person on the planet.  At least until about 9:30 p.m.

Then Saint Marty will go home to his wife and kids, and his teenage daughter will remind him that he's an idiot.

Super wisdom . . .

December 8: Winding River, Good Read, "American Primitive," New Cartoon

They walked along the road; Scrooge recognizing every gate, and post, and tree; until a little market-town appeared in the distance, with its bridge, its church, and winding river.  Some shaggy ponies now were seen trotting towards them with boys upon their backs, who called to other boys in country gigs and carts, driven by farmers.  All these boys were in great spirits, and shouted to each other, until the broad fields were so full of merry music, that the crisp air laughed to hear it.

This little scene from Stave Two of A Christmas Carol is straight out of a Currier and Ives print.  In fact, Currier and Ives owes a lot to Charles Dickens, who pretty much created the whole stereotypical snowy, idyllic Christmas landscape described in this passage.  Weather and nature play an important role in the book, indicating happiness or sorrow, mirth or dearth.

Mary Oliver, the author of American Primitive, writes about nature.  In fact, most of the poems in this  collection bear titles indicating the importance of the natural world to Oliver's work:  "Mushrooms," "Egrets," "A Poem for the Blue Heron," "Rain in Ohio," "Skunk Cabbage," "Blackberries," "The Sea," "In Blackwater Woods."  Oliver won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for this collection, and it epitomizes everything that is great about her poems.

Oliver works through nature to touch upon greater questions of survival and spirituality and silence and love.  She uses an eye that, at once, sees the minutiae of foxes and herons and dark spiders, as well as the cosmic of landscape and weather and space.  In the poem "Flying," Oliver writes,

...
you stare like an animal into
the blinding clouds
with the snapped chain of your life,
the life you know:
the deeply affectionate earth,
the familiar landscapes
slowly turning
thousands of feet below.

Oliver revels in the rich, fecund life of swamp and sea and forest.  And through that rich life, she's able to excavate the even more fertile spaces of the heart and soul.  She's an American primitive and and American treasure.

Reading Mary Oliver makes Saint Marty want to give up poetry, because he will never approach the perfection of poems like this one:

First Snow

The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning; such
an oracular fever! flowing
past windows, an energy it seemed
would never ebb, never settle
less than lovely! and only now,
deep into the night,
it has finally ended.
The silence
is immense,
and the heavens still hold
a million candles; nowhere
the familiar things;
stars, the moon,
the darkness we expect.
and nightly turn from.  Trees
glitter like castles
of ribbons, the broad fields
smolder with light, a passing
creekbed lies
heaped with shining hills;
and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain--not a single
answer has been found--
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one.

Confessions of Saint Marty