Wandering Through Winter

On a gray Saturday morning in late January, no snow, we nevertheless feel it necessary to get out into the day. The plan is simple: drive down to the Old Cedar Avenue Bridge, where there might be some birds loitering in patches of open water, and at the very least, we can take a stroll without getting our shoes muddy; then swing north on 35 W to the Art Institute to take a look at a few of the "minor" exhibits. Very low-key.

There were a few birds down at the river. A flock of sixteen trumpeter swans flew by overhead, honking. (This is the kind of nature stuff we need right now.) They're big birds, pristine, shapely, and athletic, and their trumpeting is hardly less evocative than the hooting of a great-horned owl at midnight. Also louder.

We also came upon a flock of hooded mergansers when we got to the river channel.

It was nice wandering down the asphalt path alongside the rich orange grasses, with the myriad shades of gray ice and white cracks below. Groups of fat-tire bikers passed us on the reconstructed bridge, and five-year-olds on miniature bikes who had raced ahead of their parents were screaming wildly in the damp frigid air. It does feel good to get out.

But the cool, damp, almost Danish air also has a way of sinking in, and we enjoyed the warmth of the car as drove north on the freeway to the Institute, fifteen minutes away.

It's a handsome place. Also huge. Also free. 

We lingered at the Cargill Gallery admiring the Root Collection of pottery, though we'd seen that exhibit before. As usual, we were drawn to the more functional work. Admiring a thin blue bowl with a mottled glaze, I was tempted to say to Hilary, "You've done stuff as fine as this," but I didn't, because making things isn't a quest to be as good or better than others; it's a personal need and a loving, exploratory  process.

Looking at a piece by the Finnish-American potter Otto Heino, I was reminded of the visit we paid to his studio in Ojai, California, many years ago. We stopped in unannounced that day, and he entertained us with stories for an hour. He was a nice man, well beyond eighty, living alone. But he could still throw a nice pot with ease and remove it from the wheel, dry. 

I had printed out a list of the exhibits I wanted to see, including room numbers. They all seemed to be on the third floor. The building is a labyrinth of rooms and halls arranged in no obvious pattern. We finally found "Networks of Care" but were not impressed.  

I thought it might be fun to see the show in the Herberger Gallery devoted to art created by museum staff. Hilary had picked up an official map, but that gallery wasn't marked on it. Wandering through the remote southwest corner of the third floor, amid the Art Deco furniture and Moderne blown glass, we came upon a passing guard and asked him where the Herberger Gallery was.

"Oh, that's down on the first floor," he said cheerfully. "It's that long hallway going left just beyond the coffee shop."

"You mean the hallway where they display the cast iron piggy banks and the children's tempera paintings?"

"That's the one."

He looked like a friendly guy so I said, "Do you have anything in that show?"

"Me? No. I'm not an artist, though many of my colleagues are. I spent most of my career as a project manager for litigation projects. When I quit that, I wanted to work in a more inspiring environment. And here I am, surrounded by art."

"And you like it?" I said, slightly dumbfounded.

"Oh, yeah. And you meet interesting people almost every day. Yesterday I ran into a fellow rugby player. In an art gallery! What's the likelihood of that?"

"So you played rugby?" I said. "For the University?"

"Oh, no. It was club play. We were in tournaments all over the US and Europe, paid our own way."

"How are your knees holding out?" I said.

"My knees are great," he said. "I had them both replaced!"

On our way to the Herberger Gallery we passed through a special exhibit devoted to some documentary black-and-white photos by a young Gordon Parks of a cleaning woman in Washington, D.C. circa 1940—her work, her apartment, her little children. There were also photos of religious services and a dry goods store, Asian men working, large bags of rice sitting in piles. Sometimes chaotic, often dignified.

As we paused to take in these images, I began to hear the strains of a violin in the distance, as if it were being tuned. The sound of the instrument itself was deep and rich—something you often fail to take note of when you're focused on the music being played on it. 

I was reminded of a morning years ago when Hilary and I drove up to a village in the hills above St. Tropez. Three middle-aged men who had biked to the top were standing in front of a café. The village was otherwise largely deserted, but someone was playing a violin in a second-floor room on one of the narrow streets, rehearsing the same lilting passage over and over again. It was a haunting experience, something out of a dream. 

Then I remembered that an improvisatory concert had been scheduled for one of the galleries, to be performed in complete darkness. The show was called Black Box. It wasn't on my list, but I was hearing it. I walked around the corner from the Gordon Parks exhibit, pausing briefly to admire the foggy view downtown, and approached the entry to the Black Box, which was cordoned off. A sign requesting silence also mentioned the program and listed the starting times. A small basket of earplugs was lying in front of the door--a thoughtful touch.

As I listened, it dawned on me that I was standing in one of the galleries Hilary and I had been looking for: 369, Collage/Assemblage. I looked down at a few pages of Matisse's illustrated book JAZZ that were on display in a glass case against the wall nearby. I've seen them before; this time they didn't "draw" me. Then I noticed what appeared to be a fine collage hanging on the wall opposite. I walked over to take a look, all the while vaguely entranced by the snippets of music and scratching noises emerging from the gallery nearby. At one point I heard someone whistling. At another, it sounded like a flock of sandhill cranes was approaching overhead.

The collage, "Untitled (no. 708)," dates from 1953. Anne Ryan, an artist and sometime poet I'd never heard of, put it together, inspired by a German Dadaist named Kurt Schwitters; once again, no one I knew. The collage was maybe three feet long. It was described on the plaque as a "nonverbal poem, composed from a pictographic grammar of materials." 

But isn't that what all art is? Some kind of compositional arrangement, some kind of poem?  After all, the Parks photos may have been interesting because of their content—an era and a slice of life most of us aren't familiar with—but they were beautiful by virtue of the arrangement of shadows and highlights, the curve of a mirror frame, the careworn or perky expression on a human face. 

During all the time I was in the collage gallery, I saw one woman leave the Black Box, and no one enter it. I asked a passing guard, "Is anyone in there?"

"Oh, yes," she said. "It's a ticketed performance. It runs for ninety minutes. Everyone's sitting on the floor."

"Ninety minutes!?" I said. "I'm glad I'm out here." She smiled.

Philistine that I am, I added, "But I am enjoying it."

Algorithm Blues

Emerging from a week-long fog and many hours of sleep due to cold weather, a virus, or something I ate, I find a few ideas converging—ideas that I might have ignored altogether under other conditions.

1) I was scrolling through an interview in the NY Times by Ezra Klein in which his interlocutor, an author named Kyle Chayka, was attempting to press home the point that algorithms are homogenizing the world. Chayka was complaining that wherever he goes on assignment, be it Japan or Austria or Rio, the coffee-shops he visits look the same. It finally dawned on him that " digital platforms, whether Instagram or Yelp or Google Maps, were feeding this series of cafes to me as a recommendation" because of his past preferences. He finds the same issue with film reviews, which used to be personal and idiosyncratic, whereas now, he's much more likely to rely on the aggregate score posted on Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic.

Now, anyone who's taken a look at these sites knows that they give you a score at the top and excepts from a long series of reviews underneath. If you care to read any review in detail, a link is provided. By the same token, if you look for a coffee-shop in Paris or Keokuk on Google Maps, and zoom in a bit, it will show you all of them in the neighborhood you've specified. A few  minutes of investigative work will serve to isolate the one that looks best to you. It will probably be one similar to the ones you've liked in the past, but you're free to take your pick.

2) During my week in a stupor, I roamed the house wrapped in blankets, watching highlights of the Australian Open on the computer, playing backgammon, heating up cans of chicken noodle soup, and staring at bookshelves. A volume caught my eye—oh happy day—that I thought I'd lost or gotten rid of: Stuart Hampshire's monograph on Spinoza. I'd never read it, but wanted to see what Hampshire had to say, if anything, about Spinoza's use of the term "conatus." Hampshire identifies it as the tendency toward self-preservation, and places it at the center of Spinoza's elaborate scheme.

As I browsed the relevant sections, I came upon this remark. "An unenlightened man's own account of his motives and behavior will be what we now call rationalizations; he will give plausible reasons for feeling and behaving in certain ways, but these reasons, expressed in terms of deliberate choices and decisions, will not give the true causes of his reactions....He will speak as if his desires and aversion were determined by the properties of external objects."

A case in point, Kyle Chayka's argument: the algorithm made me do it.

Meanwhile, during my brief but friendly perusal of Hampshire's book, it occurred to me where the central error of Spinoza's system lies. It isn't enough to say that the conatus—the desire to maintain equilibrium and preserve life—lies at the center of things. The sociologist George Simmel brings us closer to the truth when he remarks: "Life is that which seeks to go beyond life." That is to say, family life, social life, community life. And also the expansion of personal spirit. Why did Spinoza go to all the trouble of spelling out the details of his system, for example, except to share the good news?

3) At our best, we have all sorts of emotions stirring within us that can't be accounted for by reference to Spinoza's "inadequate ideas." At other times, our hearts are mute. One of the benefits of being "under the weather" is that the mental lethargy makes it easier to stick to a long book, where we become engaged in the emotions of others. As a result of such an effect, I now find myself three-quarters of the way through Stendhal's long and episodic novel The Charterhouse of Parma.        

There are plenty of emotions in this rambling and energetic work, which Stendhal is reputed to have written in a few months, though the central character, a young nobleman named Fabrizio del Dongo, might fairly be described as a moral idiot. The younger son of a conservative Count, Fabrizio is inspired by Napoleon's campaigns and races off, at the age of seventeen, to fight for the cause of liberty. He arrives at Waterloo just in time to participate in the famous battle, but knows nothing of guns or warfare and is attached to no military unit. He's befriended by some camp-followers hauling a food truck, briefly becomes an aide to General Ney, and meets up with numerous other adventures before making his way back to the castle in Italy where his family lives. He's in trouble now, having fought in Napoleon's army, and the Austrians are convinced he's a spy. His enchanting aunt takes Fabrizio under her wing, and for the rest of the novel their lives are intertwined in one way or another.

Fabrizio isn't quite sure whether he actually fought in a battle, and he spends most of the book convinced that he has never experienced "love," though he kills a man in a street fight over an actress—another black mark against him in the eyes of the authorities. In many ways the book resembles The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers, though the breezes of liberal political sentiment freshen the air and complicate the plot. Yes, Fabrizio (like Spinoza?) tends to over-analyze his emotions. Many of his actions seem to be inspired by the thought that "This is the kind of thing someone like me ought to do." He can stir himself to anger and burst into tears a few minutes later. It's all rather operatic ... in the best possible way. I guess that's what makes him a "modern" hero rather than a mere swashbuckler. 

But it's not the kind of novel you have to think about much. You just keep turning the pages.

Viking Romance

Wednesday morning, calm and dark.

But the dark divides itself into two dark masses: sea and sky, hardly distinguishable from one another. The wind is rising, I see that now, coming in from the east rather than the south.

I finished a Viking romance, "Bosi and Herrard," translated from Icelandic, last night. Robust but simple language, lots of teeth flying and blood gushing in the combat scenes, described with admirable succinctness and sang froid. There were also a few humorous midnight encounters between warriors and the daughters of the local inn-keepers. Characters came and went with bewildering frequency, and the names aren't that easy to remember anyway. I found it useful to make a chart to keep things straight.

Our morning escapades included walking down to the office to pay the bill. That gave us the opportunity to chat with Jamie, one of the owners, about how the resort's doing, and also about the game a few nights earlier between the Timberwolves and the Lakers, which she attended with her kids. I mentioned that the yard light was less obtrusive than in years past.

"Yeah, my parents put that bright light in," she said. "When we remodeled the house we replaced it."  

We hiked along the shore at Split Rock State Park and also took a short hike along the Beaver River on a ski trail a few miles inland from Silver Bay. At Zup's Supermarket in town we picked up a can of chili and a jar of Aunt Nellie's pickled beets to go with the chicken liver pate we'd brought along. 

We checked out the glamping tents set up in the woods across the highway from Cove Point Lodge, though at $250/night we'll never stay there. And we also took a walk along the rocks east of the docks at Two Harbors.

Sunset, though we can't see it.

Twelve gulls circle high overhead.

Rising as they drift out to sea,

Blue wings turn gold.

 

* * *

I'm caught between books. Will it be Clive James or Per Petterson? And how about Paul Valery's collection The Outlook for Intelligence? Here's a line from an essay called "Unpredictability" in which Valery steps back from using the word "transcendental":

I dislike using certain terms whose overtones startle the mind—either hypnotizing it or putting it on guard, which are opposite effects that should both be avoided.

A little further on, reflecting on the intellectual climate in 1944, he writes:

Our means of investigation have far out-stripped our means of representation and understanding.    

 

At another point Valery considers the question of whether 

"the world is becoming 'stupid,' whether there is a distaste for culture, whether the 'liberal professions' are suffering, perhaps dying—their strength declining, their ranks thinning, their prestige gradually diminishing, their existence more and more thankless, precarious, and near its end." 

Sound familiar? That was in 1925.

Back outside to see the stars. Brilliant. We spotted the Beehive Cluster, faint as it is,  with binoculars, and at midnight, coming out into the living room on my way to the bathroom, I saw a bright and perfect Leo blazing in the sky above the lake.

* * *

It was a nice morning walk up the Gooseberry River following our old ski route. The downhill runs look different when you're not worried about crashing off into the trees. Then a fine cold lunch back here at the cabin; then a nap. All is gray outside. Our final afternoon of reading, with  "You Must Believe in Spring," a CD of Frank Morgan ballads, playing on the miniature DVD/TV set that's tucked into the wall above the fireplace.

* * *

I did end up reading a second Viking romance, "Halfdan Eysteinsson." This time I didn't make the slightest effort to keep track of relationships between the characters, which included Eystein, Halfdad, Ulfkel, Ulfar, Kol, Ingigerd, Skuli, and two strangers who travel together, both named Grim. I enjoyed it all the same.

* * *

Two crows are wandering out on the rock shelf below the window, pecking desultorily at something, then pausing to discuss where to fly off to next. A model of bourgeois domesticity.

* * *

There are many things to admire about Cultural Amnesia, Clive James' collection of mini-biographies of famous people, not least the choice of entries. It's fun to see Dick Cavett next to Albert Camus and Sartre next to Satie. And how can we resist the juxtaposition of Ramond Aron and Louis Armstrong? Doing a quick count I determined that I'd never heard of roughly a third of the individuals profiled. And I'm pretty sure a few of the choices were guided less by good judgment that by personal quirks of taste: Terry Gilliam? Tony Curtis?

Now that I've read a few of the essays—William Hazlett, Norman Mailer, Georg Christoph Lichenberg—I can see that James has a few pet interests, the most prominent being the well-turned phrase. I suspect he has a notebook filled with the solecisms and mixed metaphors of famous authors. The entry on Lichtenberg, at thirty pages, might be the longest in the book, but James tells us almost nothing about this obscure eighteenth-century aphorist beyond the fact that he chose his words carefully. James devotes most of the essay to highlighting the gaffs of other writers. 

I'd never heard of Lichtenberg, and would like to have found out more about him. James at least had the good sense to direct us to J.P. Stern's Lichtenberg: a Doctrine of Scattered Occasions, which I suppose I'll try to find when I get home. Then again, when was the last time I pulled my copy of Products of the Perfected Civilization, a collection of aphorisms by Lichtenberg's misanthropic contemporary Chamfort, off the shelf? Oh, no! James has got an essay about Chamfort, too! Do I care?

* * *

Our final outing was a walk through the fields and woods away from the lake east of the resort. Lots of alder shrubs and healthy-looking white spruce. We flushed two grouse.

Now we're listening to some Handel sonatas for violin and harpsichord. Night is closing in. The gas fireplace gives off a lot of heat, but it can hardly be said to be blazing. It looks like a collection of glorified cigarette lighters nestled under a pile of artificial rocks. But it does the trick. We love it.

Curried chicken from a plastic sleeve

on couscous left over from the now-distant holidays.

A Cote du Rhone from a vineyard I've never heard of.

The fate of ideas. Zen poems.

On our last evening I take yet another book from the stack: Chet Raymo's An Intimate Look at the Night Sky. We won't be seeing any stars tonight, but it's nevertheless worthwhile to read about what we've been seeing. Raymo discusses the experiments of the ancient Greeks, including Anastarcus, and mentions Giordano Bruno--among the early champions of infinite worlds--and others on his way to the Hubble Telescope, by means of which we can be assured that the universe contains at least a hundred-billion galaxies. That's a very large number.

And now we've got an even bigger, better telescope! That means, even larger numbers.

But then someone in class pipes up: "It makes me feel so insignificant!" That has always struck me as a dumb remark (pardon the expression), though the intent, I'm sure, is to express the inexpressible--the problem Valery highlighted half a century ago. Of course, in many ways we are insignificant, all of us, except to our loved ones, our friends, and the people who rely on us from day to day to deliver their morning paper, repair their car, diagnose their ailments, edit their books, or whatever it is we do to make a little "bread" and contribute to the community.

Yet the stars are ours. Whose else could they be? We see them, know them, love them. Their brilliance is a sign of our own perspicacity, insight, and blinding affection, shooting out in all directions.

  

The Narrow Road to the Deep North Shore

New Year's Eve. Castle Haven Resort. Waves crashing in the dark.

Our now-standard side-trip to the Sax-Zix Bog on the way up was fruitful. No exotic owls, but the rough-legged hawks seemed to be everywhere, both dark and light phases. Several Canada jays. 

A highlight was an extended view of a martin feverishly eating something wonderful—probably some peanut butter put there by a bog volunteer—out of the hollow bore of an upended log near a feeding station on Admiral Road.

* * *

Monday morning, approaching seven. Still pitch dark. Surf is down. We're sitting by the fire. Still in the bird-watching mood, I just looked up the differing traits of the black-backed and the three-toed woodpeckers. Much more white behind the eye on the three-toed variety. Also some pale white stripes running from side to side down the back.   

* * *

Back from Gooseberry Park, where we walked along the waterfront picnic area, hoping to see a few snow buntings. One large flock of tiny birds—probably siskins—swooped above our heads en masse into the top of an open jack pine and disappeared altogether. A few minutes later we spotted a few tree sparrows in an alder thicket. That's a common winter bird, easy to identify. A few days later, consulting eBird, I discovered that it's considered rare at this location and time of year.

From the visitors' center we hiked up the west side of the falls through dark pines (featured on the cover of Louis Jenkins' Collected Poems) up the river to Fifth Falls through a thin layer of snow, hardly enough to cover the leaves and twigs. Saw no one. Returned downstream closer to the river. The sun had come out, and the blue sky reflected on the surface of the icy water gave it the look of a vigorous spring freshet.

* * *

Now there's bright sun blazing into the cabin. I'm sitting on the futon/couch, but I. might have to move as the sun creeps west.

I read hurriedly

to finish the book before

the sunlight reaches my face.

 

Yes, I'm reading the learned introduction to Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North, but the passages the author refers to as "clever interpretation" and "ingenious transfer" seem ho-hum to me. As do nearly all haiku. The syllable count isn't interesting, except as a creative challenge. The simplicity of the result is. 

 Awakened from my nap,

I see the white-caps have grow.

Time to relight the fire.

Coming upon a child abandoned by its parents on the beach, Basho gives it what food he can spare. Attributing its sorry situation to "the irresistible will of heaven," he passes on, leaving the child to its fate. He refers to a massive pine as a "cold senseless object," but a few lines later describes it as "eternal as law." This "law" is probably something similar to the Greek notion of "logos."

* * *

An afternoon foray to the Superior Hiking Trail a few miles inland from the Rustic Inn. A rocky, icy climb through brilliant sun and snow to the top for a spectacular look out to sea across the valley of the Encampment River. But during the second leg, across flat scrubby country to Crow Creek, Hilary's eye started to act weird and we turned back. It's happened a few times before, always while hiking in winter. Now we're sitting in front of the fire again, eating spicy pretzels and looking out at the whitecaps stretching as far as the eye can see. The sun is low and everything here on land is in shadow.

* * *

Basho compares himself at one point to a bat who waivers ceaselessly between being a bird and a mouse. A few pages later he writes:

Unwilling to part with the passing year, I drank till late on the last day of December. When I awoke after a long sleep, the first day of the new year was more than half gone.

 

Hilary and I shared a bottle of white wine and got up at 5:30 this morning.

Having showered and changed

I pour myself a glass of white wine.

This plastic juice glass better suits the winter day

than cut crystal.

 

There are few things here to distract me from Basho's simple-minded but somehow charming travelogues. At one point he writes:

My only mundane concerns were whether I would be able to find a suitable place to sleep at night and whether the straw sandals were the right size for my feet. Every turn of the road brought me new thoughts and every sunrise gave me fresh emotions. My joy was great when I encountered anyone with the slightest understanding of artistic elegance. Even those whom I had long hated for being antiquated and stubborn sometimes proved to be pleasant companions on my wandering journey. Indeed, one of the greatest pleasures of traveling was to find a genius hidden among weeds and bushes, a treasure lost in broken tiles, a mass of gold, buried in clay.

 

To talk casually

About an iris flower

is one of the pleasures

of the wandering journey.

This is one of Basho's better poetic efforts. His prose is often equally poetic.

It was the middle of April when I wandered out to the beach of Suma. The sky was slightly overcast, and the moon on a short night of early summer had special beauty. The mountains were dark with foliage. When I thought it was about time to hear the first voice of the cuckoo, the light of the sun touched the eastern horizon, and as it increased I began to see on the hills of Ueno ripe ears of wheat tinged with reddish brown and fisherman's huts scattered here and there among the flowers of white poppy.

 

* * *

We inched forward along the deck, feeling with our feet for the first step. It was dark, also cold; no moon, the stars were very bright. The square of Pegasus, Orion, Auriga, the Pleiades, against the rich blackness of night. Hilary saw a dramatic shooting star. I missed it.

The yard light a hundred yards down the way was out. Good. We located Andromeda without much difficulty, a lovely smudge in the darkness. Jupiter was blazing. I was hoping for a second meteor, but no such luck. The biting wind eventually drove us back inside.

You don't see such a brilliant night sky in the Cities. Nowhere near it. It touches something deep and mysterious—a welcome gift.

* * *

Tuesday afternoon, we're back from an extended excursion up the shore. The sky is a mottled gray, and the big lake is covered with gentle, almost imperceptible swells burnished with tiny ripples. The crests that finally appear a few feet from shore make only a half-hearted murmur when they break. The distant shore is clearly visible, including a few of the Apostle Islands.

As we drove up the shore earlier this morning the clouds were scanty, and our hike out to the end of Shovel Point was full of sunshine and clear green-blue water, not to mention the glistening rocks and moss and the bristling evergreen shrubbery. A heavenly walk. 

By the time we returned to the car the clouds had moved in again. Having come this far up the shore, we decided to continue east to Grand Marais. The big question became: Where to go for lunch? We considered several alternatives but finally chose the Cascade Lodge because it was closest, we'd never eaten there before, and the menu Hilary called up on her phone listed a "bliss" beet salad with arugula, feta, sautéed garbanzos, and mandarin orange slices.

The place had a woodsy feel, but it was somewhat classier than one would expect to judge from the weather-beaten exterior. I went with the salad. Excellent. Hilary ordered an Irish beef stew cooked with Guinness that was thick, warm, and tasty. There was only one other couple in the place, and when I asked about the vaguely Irish flavor of the place, our server explained that the previous owners had been Scottish, and the current new owners even more so. I told her a bit about my Scottish roots and she shared the results of her recent DNA test. "My people are from Ohio originally. Like did you read Hillbilly Elegy? That's my region. Some of my ancestors left, some stayed. Different choices, different outcomes. I was actually born in Alaska."

As we were leaving I said, "I've driven by this place for fifty years, and this is the first time I've stopped in."

"Lots of people say that," she said.  

* * *

Grand Marais was cold and quiet. I felt a little sorry for the flock of golden-eye we saw bobbing in the harbor. The Ben Franklin was closed. The donut shop was closed. But Drury Lane Books had a sandwich board set up on the sidewalk proudly proclaiming that it was open from 9 to 5 seven days a week. Warm and cheery inside. Plenty of best-sellers and local titles on display. A few are tempting. Then again, I've got a stack of books waiting for me back at the cabin. 

Now for the long drive back.

* * *

Basho: The pines are of the freshest green, and their branches are carved in exquisite lines, bent by the wind constantly blowing through them. Indeed, the beauty of the entire scene can only be compared to the most divinely endowed of feminine countenances, for who else could have created such beauty but the great god nature himself?

A few pages later I come upon one of his less appealing haiku:

Bitten by fleas and lice,

I slept in a bed,

a horse urinating all the time

close to my pillow.

 

For dinner we finished off Hilary's Irish stew, preserved for us at the restaurant in a light brown cardboard container like the ones used to transport live worms to be used for bait. Once we'd finished that we moved on to some broiled chicken with prunes and olives left over from a birthday party we hosted recently with friends. Not bad!

* * *

I've finally finished The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and remain unconvinced of Basho's gifts as a poet. But I thoroughly enjoyed his home-spun descriptions of sights along the way and encounters with other travelers. Isn't that the challenge facing the chronicler? How to express the ecstasy of seeing a patch of moss on a rock lit up by glancing sunlight, or the good feeling that develops briefly among passing strangers?

At one point in the introduction the translator, Nobuyuki Yuasa, quotes Basho as follows:

Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one—when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there.

 

Well, maybe. But it seems to me that poetry is never about objects. Always about events. Turning to the Everyman Library of Zen Poems, I come upon this gem by Basho:

 

The beginning of art—

the depth of the country

and a rice-planting song.

 

I step outside into the cold. A hazy darkness. Not a hint of a star. Only a brief yellow flash or two my eye provides for itself.