Another Bayfield Jaunt

We mentioned to my cousin Pat during our post-Thanksgiving breakfast that we were heading to Bayfield later that morning.

"What are you going to do there?" she asked, perhaps a little doubtful. Good question. The response must have sounded lame.

"Oh, take a few hikes, do some reading, maybe visit the Ashland bakery, fry up some fresh herring from Bodin's for dinner ...."

And that's basically what we did. The weather was very fine—mostly warm and sunny—and the countryside was largely deserted. Our drive north was punctuated by a stops on Highway 23 south of Jay Cooke State Park to harvest a few branches of winterberry, at the Brule River canoe landing, and the Michele Wheeler Wetland just west of Port Wing.

The Halverson fishery in Cornucopia was closed, as usual. Bodin's in Bayfield was open, but they were out of fresh fish. We contented ourselves with some smoked whitefish, and the young woman behind the counter promised she'd save us a few filets of herring the next day. "Stop by any time after two."

We checked into our little studio apartment—essentially a motel room with a kitchen—on the second floor of a small condo tucked into the woods behind the Superior Marina, and drove down to the nearby beach to enjoy the sunset.

We also wandered the marina itself, just to familiarize ourselves with the neighborhood, though the slips were empty. After a cold dinner in our room we went out to the parking lot to take a look at the stars, which were brilliant against the inky black. I was puzzled by the star cluster I could see just above the horizon through the naked trees, and made a mental note of the distance from Perseus and Cassiopeia.

A shooting star streaked by from left to right—the first I'd seen months. I struggled to spot the Andromeda Galaxy; I know where to find it but didn't dare look straight overhead with binoculars while standing on the faintly icy pavement. We could hear the sound of bongos coming from one of the units in the other building, which looked more prestigious than ours because all the doors were painted red.

The leather lace in one of my moccasins had come undone and insinuated itself between my toe and the side of the shoe, as if  a pebble had found its way in. This trivial distraction was undermining my full appreciation of the night sky--a scene which nevertheless I will remember for the rest of my life.

Back inside, I took a paperback of Horace's satires from the stack I'd brought along, and it occurred to me they resemble Montaigne's essays, but pithier, and with more of a lilt:

And so it happens that those who in having

A more than moderate share the floor-raging Aufidis

sweeps away with its crumbling bank, but he

who wants only what he needs neither drinks water

churned up with mud nor loses his life in the waves.

 

Obvious, but well-put just the same.

_____________________________________

Saturday morning, 6 a.m. Coffee brewing, still dark outside. I probably woke up the entire unit with the coffee grinder—though I'm not sure anyone else is staying in this building. Plans for the day? Maybe breakfast in Washburn, a hike to Houghton Falls, a stop at the Great Lakes Visitor Center on Highway 2, then on to the bakery in Ashland and the Black Cat coffee shop across the street. We might well stop at the huge used bookstore in Washburn on our way back to Bayfield to pick up our herring fillets at Bodin's.

Which is basically what we did, though not in that order. We picked up a brochure of local hiking trails at the visitors' center, and decided to hike up the gorge that cuts through the middle of Bayfield. But not before stopping at the Washburn community center where they were holding a Christmas Bazaar—herbal soap, spicy pickles, wicker baskets, hand-painted pottery.

The Bayfield Gorge

I chatted briefly with the man selling wicker baskets, asked him where he got his withies. "Anywhere and everywhere," he said. "Road construction sites are good, especially the second year after the work is done." That's good to know, I guess.

I liked the guy behind the counter at the bakery, and the guy behind the counter at the Black Cat, where, in the back-room used bookshop, we found (and bought) a copiously illustrated full-color history of jazz. (“Jazz is a music played by Americans to get rid of the blues.”) I liked the girl behind the counter there too, and also the young woman at Bodin's, who told us she'd never been out in the fishing boats, two of which were tied up outside the shop, but would like to go someday.

This litany of events does nothing to convey the nuances of light and shadow, vegetation and snow cover, that moved us repeatedly during the day. Nor the tenderness with which we viewed a flock of pine siskins feeding in a clump of alders in the swamp behind the visitors' center. Not to mention the tundra swans we spotted at Mikowski Beach in Ashland, Or the fifteen common goldeneye we flushed just beyond the mouth of Pike Creek along the Salmo Trail at dusk. 

Nor the underlying concern during our hikes that we might get shot by deer-hunters during the last weekend of the season.

On our way to the Houghton Falls trail just after daybreak that first morning, I spotted a bright orange bag in the ditch beside the road, pulled onto the shoulder, stopped the car, and retrieved it. Printed on the side were the words: "50 lb. kernel corn." When we reached the trailhead Hilary sliced it open with a pocket knife and cut a hole in the middle large enough for me to stick my head through. It looked a little odd, but it was bright, and not the kind of thing a deer would wear.

Sacred Nature: The Dark Enigma Gate

In her latest book, Sacred Nature: Restoring Our Ancient Bond with the Natural World, the religious historian Karen Armstrong has taken up the question of whether we might succeed in averting environmental catastrophe by modifying our attitude toward the environment—coming to view it as sacred, rather than merely useful. She argues that Christianity devotes less attention, and affords less respect to living things beyond the human realm than do other religions. I'm not sure this is true, but  Armstrong does a good job of highlighting attractive elements of Buddhist, Hindu, Confucian, Moslem, and even Jewish religious thought and practice that Westerners in general, and Christians in particular, might benefit from exploring. She writes:

In the Middle East ilam, meaning "divinity" in Akkadian, was a radiant power that transcended any singular diety. In India, the Braham, the ultimate reality, was indefinable; it was a sacred energy that was deeper, higher, and more fundamental than the "devas," the gods who were present in nature but had no control over the natural order. In China, the ultimate reality was the "Dao," the fundamental "Way" of the cosmos; nothing could be said about it, because it transcended all normal categories."

Armstrong explores these various sacred traditions, mostly dating from the Axial Age (900-200 BCE) and along the way relates a string of telling, and sometimes amusing, anecdotes. For example, the seventeenth-century Confucian scholar Fang Yizhi, after engaging in theological discussion with the Jesuits, concluded that the West was "detailed in material investigation," but deficient in "comprehending seminal forces."

In another chapter she informs us that the medieval Jewish mystics who developed the tradition of the Kabbalah were, in part, "responding to a popular demand for a more immanent notion of the sacred." These thinkers argued, contra the Biblical view, that God hadn't created the world “out of nothing.” Rather, "creation had proceeded stage by stage 'out of God.' " It followed, by their way of thinking, that what we take to be the original, primal "nothing," is always present, and more "real" than the things right  in front of our eyes. We can't perceive it only because  "the core of divinity is forever unknowable."

This kind of lore really tickles my fancy, notwithstanding the fact  that the subject is beyond words and basically unknowable. It seems to me that we may catch glimpses of the sacred out of the corner of our eye, but if we turn our head for a better look it's gone. We always want more, though we probably wouldn't know what to do with it if we met it face to face.  

On the other hand, though I haven't read the book cover to cover, it strikes me that Armstrong tends to give Christianity short shrift in her effort to make her point. She mentions St. Thomas Aquinas's argument that God wrote two books—the Bible and the Book of Creation—but goes on to suggest that such notions were crushed underfoot by the critical and investigative spirit that culminated in Newton's mathematically based conception of the universe. This is true enough. Yet Aquinas was never a source of popular understanding of natural processes, which was far more often derived from the alchemical and magical practices espoused by healers and proto-scientists of whom Paracelsus was perhaps the most famous.Newton himself spent a great deal of time investigating such things, when he wasn't tracking the planets.  

Armstrong is on firmer ground with St. Francis of Assisi, and she reproduces a lengthy passage from one of his poems. But in order to bend it to her thesis, she counsels us to consider that the "Lord" to whom the poem is addressed, and who appears in almost every line, is the "transcendent force that imbues the whole natural order," rather than the more conventional celestial father of Biblical tradition.

Really? I doubt it. To my ears, it sounds as if St. Francis were address a specific person or presence. And isn't that simply another way of drawing our attention to the third "person" of the Trinity—the Holy Spirit? But such a reference actually proves her point. Whereas several Eastern traditions enshrine a natural energy or flow, nameless and elusive, the Judeo-Christian tradition has developed largely as a dialog between "the people" and their God, who is basically a transcendental vision of themselves. In the process, the wonder and mystery of the natural world is devalued. And that's a bad thing. 

Armstrong spends little time describing her own connection with nature. It isn't that kind of a book. Her purpose is to bring us to a wider and deeper awareness of the sacred element in nature as it manifests itself in a variety of "classical" traditions. And along these lines her thoughts and erudition are welcome.

But the fundamental question remains to be answered: Is nature really sacred? For that matter, does the word "nature" refer to anything real?

A Zoroastrian temple

It strikes me that sacred things—or places—tend to be unusual or remote, set off in one way or another from day-to-day experience. For example, few are allowed to visit the inner sanctum of a temple. Not only would they be likely to despoil it due to inexperience or "uncleanliness," but it would begin to lose its hallowed character were we to become too familiar with it. By the same token, a sacred bundle in the care of a Native American elder is not a thing for young children to play with. Rather, tribal members approach it with ceremony and call upon its energy only on rare occasions. In the presence of such objects or locales, we are often gripped by a feeling, difficult to describe but compounded of beauty, pleasure, preciousness, and latent energy or power.

But everyone doesn't feel the same way about such things. I'm thinking here of all the churches and monasteries that were used as stables and munitions dumps during the French Revolution, or the scene in the film Ladybird during which Saoirse Ronan and her friend lie on the floor in a hallway of a church munching down a few communion wafers as an afternoon snack. Shame on them! 

Many of us were brought up under the injunction to "fear the Lord," which was an old-fashioned way of advising us to revere him, I think. But I find it hard to see how nature broadly considered can be placed in the rarefied category of the sacred. Most of us can recall specific times when, in the presence of awesome or pristine natural phenomena, we were gripped with that feeling of reverence, or ecstasy even. Depending on how much time you spend outdoors, this can become almost a common experience.

If I read her right, Emily Dickinson had such feelings, though they didn't last long.

Did Our Best Moment last —

'Twould supersede the Heaven —

A few — and they by Risk — procure —

So this Sort — are not given —

 

Except as stimulants — in

Cases of Despair —

Or Stupor — The Reserve —

These Heavenly moments are —

 

A Grant of the Divine —

That Certain as it Comes —

Withdraws — and leaves the dazzled Soul

In her unfurnished Rooms –

 

I suppose it's a matter of temperament and circumstances, but I receive such grants of the divine fairly often, and there are times when I see evidence of beauty and order almost everywhere I look. 

I often get that feeling when I turn on my computer.

No, I don't worship technology. But my computer has a very large screen, and over the years I've accumulated quite a few exquisite screen-savers—photographs I've taken myself. Some of them are classically picturesque images of mountain peaks and crashing surf, almost worthy of a Sierra Club calendar, but the ones that fill me with the greatest awe are photographs of random vegetation. There is no point of focus. The eye wanders from one flower, leaf, or twig to the next, admiring the harmony and intricacy of an exquisite but obviously unplanned arrangement.

Unplanned, yes. Random? No. These plants have followed divergent evolutionary paths to their present shape and dimensions, each one different, but guided by the same need for sunlight and nutrients. They share a chunk of soil, a plot of ground, perhaps uneasily, but often beautifully, as they scramble for a place in the sun. As my eye roams here and there amid the vegetation vividly illuminated on my screen, I pause to take the measure of, and appreciate, a particular leaf or plant that I would certainly never have noticed on a tramp through the fields, and it fills my heart with awe and affection.

But we ought to acknowledge that the "nature" I'm describing here is a thing I chose and framed myself. Not every rotten log and weedy roadside produces the same effect. So perhaps their sacred character is the result of both natural processes and my own aesthetic sense. But isn't this the connection—this communion—we're looking for?

It all ties in, I think, with a fundamental but, as Armstrong admits, all but inexpressible logic that poets and thinkers have been attempting to describe for millennia. 

Another route to sacred nature, I think, lies in cooking. It's easy to enjoy the flavors we concoct in the kitchen, many of them natural enough. But how often do we take to time to pay homage to the living things we're making use of to sustain us. Here again, it might be simply that I have the good fortune to see the vegetables I'm chopping up for a carrot-based pot of chili in a spectacular slant of light coming into the kitchen through the dining room windows.

It's a temple--and a sacrifice--right in front of my eyes.

Taoists use the phrase "the ten-thousand things" to denote the diversity of stuff in the universe. In the introduction to his translations of the Tang poet Po Chu-i, David Hinton writes that Po "came to realize that the self was also one of those ten thousand things that are utterly themselves and sufficient." This was an important step, because it bridged the chasm between individual and environment, allowing them to settle into one another.

On the next page, Hinton introduces us to a few Chinese concepts: hsien—profound serenity and quietness; lan—the heart-mind of trust; wu-wei—the practice of tzu-jan, which he describes as "occurrence happening of itself." 

For Po, Hinton writes, idleness was "a kind of meditative revel in tzu-jan, a state in which daily life becomes the essence of spiritual practice."

  

Our garden path to the compost pile.

 In such an environment the tea bowl and the flagstone path through the moss become sacred entities—though perhaps little that's worthwhile ever gets done. 

Here's a piece by Chui-I, chosen almost at random.

OVERNIGHT AT BAMBOO PAVILION

Sit through dusk beneath eaves of pine
at Bamboo Pavilion, sleep night away:

it’s such empty clarity, like some drug,
isolate mystery deep as a mountain home.

No cleverness can rival a simple mind,
and industry never outshines idleness.

Done struggling, done cultivating Tao:
here it is, this remote DarkEnigma gate.

You won't find much of this quietistic appreciation in the lyric poetry of the Greeks, but the broader notion of a cosmic order appears in the concept of logos. Armstrong misses a trick here, I think, her vast erudition notwithstanding, when she writes, "The logos deals with facts." Not so.

Nowadays we translate logos as “word,” but consulting an on-line dictionary at random, I am confirmed in my understanding that “logos” carried a wealth of meanings in ancient times. To the pre-Socratics, it was the principle governing the cosmos, the source of this principle, and the human reasoning that struggled to come to grips with it more fully on a personal level. The Stoics held a similar view, though they more explicitly associated it with God as the source of all activity and generation, and with “mind” (nous), which, through the power of reason, develops the wherewithal to illuminate the order in experience and even, on occasion, make a leap to the divine.

In short, “logos” is not merely “the word” or language, and it has nothing to do with facts. It's a logic that unites the cosmos and the individual in some sort of quivering harmony. I am reminded here of the quivering mosquito twins in the Book of the Hopi that sustain the universe, and the musical meters which, in the Satapatha Brahmana, are the cattle of the gods.

I think Armstrong would approve of such associations. Her intention is to familiarize us with them through her acute descriptions of the rituals, myths, and metaphors of ancient times and foreign traditions. The hope is that they will allow us to embrace nature's sacred dimension more fully.

I have neglected to mention one important and illuminating aspect of the sacred: it's political dimension. In his farewell address of 1796, George Washington refers to it when he writes:

“The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. But the constitution which at any time exists, until changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all."

Yes, the agreements that preserve and protect our individual and social freedoms are sacrosanct. But what about the birds, the eels, and the mountain springs? 

 

Wordle Wonderland

Everything I know about Wordle, which is nothing, I learned by playing Wordle, a word game that seemed to spring up overnight, though by now it commands the attention, albeit briefly, of millions every day. The challenge it presents is to guess a five-letter word simply by selecting five letters.

You have six tries.  If a letter in the word you choose  is somewhere in the mystery word, its background will change to orange, unless that letter is also in the correct position, in which case the background will become green. Once you have chosen your suite of letters and hit the "enter" button, the letters seem to flip open like the squares in old-fashioned  TV game shows. And the thrill of watching the tiles flip, one after the other—gray, gray, orange, gray, green—is considerable. But the sensation when  the word you enter flips green, green, green, green, green must resemble that of a game-show contestant who has just won a trip to Hawaii.

Among Wordle's many attractive features is the fact that the meaning of words has no part to play in it. Some experts no doubt calculate word combinations and frequencies, but I love the freedom of choosing any word that strikes my fancy as a starter.

If it's a lovely morning, I might enter the word PEACH. If I got up on the wrong side of the bed, my opening word might be GRUNT. There are times when I tempt fate by beginning with an unusual word like EPOCH or FRACK. I go through phases where I emphasize the vowels—ALIEN—and others during which I play it safe, as it were, with ho-hum words like CRANE or MEANT. For a while I had a working rule of excluding S and T from my opening guess. I believe the letter H is the key to the entire business. But I have no idea how that could be. Or why.

Another attractive feature of the game is the fact that you can play it only once a day. And it only takes a few minutes to complete, unless you find yourself in a position where several boxes are green, many letters have been eliminated, and you're sure the answer lies within your grasp. In that case, you could spend twenty minutes on a single guess.

If you happen to get the word in three guesses the rest of the day goes well. It you get it in two, which is always pure luck, you pass the hours enveloped in an unseen transcendent glow. If you drag out the procedure to five or (shudder) even six guesses, gray clouds appear on the horizon.

Well, there's always tomorrow.

A third attractive feature is the fact that your previous effort vanishes forever the day after you submit it. I find it difficult to remember what today's word was a few minutes after I've discovered it, perhaps because the word's meaning has nothing to do with its correctness. But I tend to remember how many tries it took me to get there.

So far I've played Wordle 229 times (they provide you with the statistics automatically ) and have failed to guess the word within the allotted six tries only three times. Is that good or bad? How would I know?

The words I've failed to guess in the six allotted rows have all be easy words, but very similar to many other easy words: LOVER, COVER, HOVER, MOVER, ROVER.  Sheer luck if you get such a word in four or five guesses. On the other hand, a few weeks ago I got the Wordle in two, and the Wordle Bot told me I'd picked the correct answer from 507 remaining possibilities. A true shot in the dark.

What was the word? STEIN.

Then just the other day, I got the correct word in two again. This time it was my first guess that was lucky: SALTY. Only the first and last letters were wrong, and the second guess came easy: WALTZ.

According to the bot, which I sometimes take a look at after I've solved the puzzle, that was the only possible guess left.

The bot has no genuine heuristic advice to offer, but it has access to lots of statistics, and it can tell you what the average score for that day's round has been.