POEM: OASIS

Oasis

Safe in this arctic season,

flowers can take an age

reaching the window.

So it’s by chance or otherwise

that one day you look out across

all that unbroken white,

suddenly surprised to

remember feeling.

And feeling the difference

come as quick and as sharp

as the snapping of a leg bone,

you think you might do well

to hold your breath and wait

while the pain settles in

for a long winter’s nap.

OKAY. A BUMMER. I KNOW. Bleak and unrelenting like the polar vortex weather system that’s enveloping large parts of North America as I write this. Pardon my French, but it is freakin’ freezing out there folks! I feel like doing what those high school kids did to stay warm in the 2004 movie, The Day After Tomorrow. (Great title. Not so great movie, but they keep replaying it on television all the time. I guess since TV’s such a frozen wasteland and all.) Trapped in New York City’s central library, with the frigid weather closing in on them, they begin burning books to survive, fortunately from the shelves of the library’s tax law collection.

For those who don’t know (like me) what a polar vortex is, it’s
  

…an upper level low-pressure area lying near the Earth's poles. There are two polar vortices in the Earth's atmosphere, overlying the North and South Poles. Each polar vortex is a persistent, large-scale, low-pressure zone that rotates counter-clockwise at the North Pole (called a cyclone) and clockwise at the South Pole, i.e., both polar vortices rotate eastward around the poles. The bases of the two polar vortices are located in the middle and upper troposphere and extend into the stratosphere. Beneath that lies a large mass of cold, dense Arctic air. Wikipedia.

Got that? So the recent blast of frigid air we’ve been experiencing is due to the destabilizing effects of a rapidly warming Arctic which has caused that freaky-cold Arctic air to move uninvited down here. So let’s get on with global warming, already! I just bought a time-share in a Baffin Island condo, so the sooner the Arctic loses all that snow and ice, the better. I need to move to where there will be some sun, surf and sand. Just think how much we’ll save in shovels and road salt and stuff!….

So, the poem:

The speaker is alone, isolated, yet he feels “safe” in this frozen state. The speaker calls it an arctic “season” which is a little odd. What does that mean? Is the oasis a season then? One important characteristic of the oasis is that flowers there take an “age” to reach the window. And by age does the speaker mean they take a long time to grow until they reach past the windowsill? Or does it refer to some timeline? Since the speaker feels “safe” there, presumably the lack of flowers is a good thing. 
We have another image of wintertime as “unbroken white” outside. The fact that the landscape appears “unbroken”, contrasts with the imagery of the leg bone. Perhaps the speaker is reluctant to experience anything that is ’broken’? Perhaps the speaker does not want to accept brokenness is necessary in some way?

The speaker is “surprised” to remember a feeling, emotions long suppressed. This  memory of feeling disturbs the speaker. He sees a “difference” between how he is now and how he was. This is a painful awareness. This awareness of past and present has come suddenly and seems not to go away. The quick onset of awareness contrasts with the lethargy of the speaker’s recent past. What caused the speaker to suddenly, “remember feeling”? How did they lose the ability in the first place? The speaker indicates that the pain will “settle in” for a “long winter’s nap.” The speaker holds his breath, waiting for the pain to come.

What will happen?  His oasis has been described as being in an “arctic” season” which has no time frame on a human scale. How long does the arctic 'last'? Before global warming, we would have said forever. (Which, of course, is not accurate, but you take my point.)  
By the poem’s end the season has become "winter". The pain the speaker experiences, of remembering how they once felt will “settle in” now. When it emerges in the spring, what will happen?
The poem ends with a reference to, “Twas the Night Before Christmas”, suggesting the speaker may find a gift waiting for them.
Even if it's just a lump of coal.

DECLINE AND FALL: JOHN D, AGAIN: CINNAMON SKIN AND "MAKING [insert name] GREAT AGAIN!"

IN THEIR VISIT TO SYRACUSE, NEW YORK to track down the serial killer responsible for the death of Meyer’s niece, Travis looks around the noontime restaurant where he and Meyer have stopped to eat. The downtown restaurant has a large number of city bureaucrats and politicos on their lunch break, all seeming to Travis to have a “feverish gregariousness” and who “seemed so frantic about having a good time.” Meyer presents Travis with his analysis about why they seem to have such a demeanor about them:

It’s energy without a productive outlet, I think. Most of these Mohawk Valley cities are dying, have been for years: Albany, Troy, Amsterdam, Utica, Syracuse, Rome. And so they made an industry out of government. State office buildings in the decaying downtowns. A proliferation of committees, surveys, advisory boards, commissions, legal actions, grants, welfare, zoning boards, road departments, health care groups…thousands upon thousands of people making a reasonably good living working for city, county, state, and federal governments in these dwindling cities, passing the same tax dollars back and forth. I think that man, by instinct, is productive. He wants to make something, a stone ax, a bigger cave, better arrows, whatever. But these bright and energetic men know in their hearts that they are not making anything. They use every connection, every contact, every device, to stay within reach of public monies. Working within an abstraction is just not a totally honorable way life. Hence the air of jumpy joy, the backslaps ringing too loudly, compliments too extravagant, toasts too ornate, marriages too brief, lawsuits too long-drawn, obligatory  forms too complex and too long. Their city has gone stale, and the light wanes, they dance.

A short while later, in visiting the sister of the killer Evan Lawrence to gain information that will aid them in their quest to track him down Travis and Meyer come to a house where they are “stunned by the profusion of junk that filled the yard from fence to fence.” All manner of detritus was on display, manufactured in the factories of post-War America for the burgeoning consumer markets that seemed all but insatiable; junk and more junk.  Travis looks at the scene and thinks:

The scene stunned the mind. It was impossible to take it all in at once. In a strange way it had an almost artistic impact, a new art form devised in three dimensions to show the collapse of Western civilization. It made me think of an object I had seen in New York when a woman persuaded me to go with her to an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The object was a realistic-looking plastic hamburger on a bun with an ooze of mustard, pickle, and catsup. It was ten feet in diameter and stood five feet height. This scene had that same total familiarity plus unreality.

Salad Shooters. Really?

Helen June’s yard represents for MacDonald the wasteful excess of the throw-away culture that so much of the developed world has adopted, with the availability of abundant sources of oil, the growth of economies based on consumer spending (aided by the expansion of credit sources such as credit cards in the 1970s) and globalization which has had such a profound impact on the manufacturing regions in the developed world, like the “rust belt” of Ohio, Michigan, central New York State (where Travis and Meyer have lunch) and other states, and which removed factories and jobs to low-wage regions of the world.

Meyer talks about the scrambling for resources, money, security, and stability in the wake of high unemployment and stagnant local economies. Who scrambles up the slag heap and comes out on top? In 1982, MacDonald sees the bureaucrats and the politically-connected emerge as the elites of Syracuse. They control the flow of government monies that were then coming into the area for welfare, unemployment benefits, new roads and other works projects to help fill the void left when the local economies were gutted by the new economic policies then being adopted by Margret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Regan in America. The image Meyer portrays of unproductive “man” is apt. Without purpose, what do we do with our hands? Meyer says that we find unproductive, make-work things to do; in Syracuse it’s the expansion of the local bureaucracy that’s become the booming local industry: paperwork not sheet steel, committees instead of car parts. And government monies and local initiatives and redevelopment projects all have played a role in revitalizing some areas that have experienced job losses and unemployment.

Revitalizing’ is such a developer’s words these days. The word “vital” comes from Old English and had the meaning of something that is “indispensable” or “absolutely necessary”. But when you rip the core out of a community, as we have seen time and time again with globalization, ‘free’ trade, big box stores, etc. can you ever replace the vital businesses, relationships, infrastructures and interconnections that made the place function?

The last thirty or forty years have seen many attempts to revitalize those affected communities, some with more success than others; most leave them with left-over jobs and decaying infrastructures, high rates of poverty and greyer futures. But globalization, just-in-time manufacturing, the financialization of a large portion of the economy (money making money instead of people making things), will not allow sustainable vitality to return. The manufacturing jobs that have left for China and elsewhere are gone. They will not come back, despite what the current American president promises. (South-western Ontario, where I am from, has experienced for decades the strains such short-sighted policies bring.) There will be a long period of decline in those regions that have been ‘papered-over’ with the temporary businesses and government funds. 

Tattoo parlours and ATMs do not a main street make. Where hope lies is in local initiatives once more undertaken by local populations who have a vested interest in the stability of their communities. New vitality will come with the making of things and providing services that people actually need. We are apes who use tools, after all. Let's use them wisely. Fuck salad shooters. 

POEM: TIME

Time

In the content of oceans,

from ancient seas

where diatoms

once floated like ciphers

in warm, sunlit waters.

Then in the lava flows,

in thrusting mountains; later

from the dust of fallen trees,

and along hot fields

where spindly birds

harry husks

for dry seeds.

      

At last in the skies,

where come the winds

that blow through

the broken grasses

and tufts of future stems,

and out to where the clouds call—

here, is still time.

W. O. MITCHELL'S CLASSIC NOVEL, Who has seen the Wind? may have been on my mind when I wrote this. Who has seen the wind, or who will see the wind is another question, perhaps. Youth will see it, certainly, as they experience the richness of life around them for the first time--as will those that look for it and find it as a joyful discovery. All who wish to see it will come upon it someday, somewhere. 
And so, as I like to begin all my poems with a few billion years of perspective, I begin, naturally, with diatoms* (I just love the word, actually.) They are single-celled algae and are classified as neither plant nor animal but share characteristics common to both. These tiny, aquatic creatures produce over 20% of the world’s oxygen through photosynthesis, and are responsible for sequestering some 40% of the C02 gas emitted each year globally (think oil and algal blooms and green slime on lakes and  you get some idea of the range of marine environments they inhabit). Arguably, without these billion-year old lifeforms, life on planet Earth would be impossible. They also make up some 40% of the oceans’ biomass, which is a bit astounding to me. I am reminded of ‘critters’ like fungi, which, in terms of biological classification are in a kingdom all their own. 

Mushrooms, funny looking moss pods, bread mold, all that stuff always creeped me out a bit, especially as a teenager. I couldn’t help think of aliens taking over my body by osmosis or tentacles or whatever. (Typical adolescent sexuality-identity crisis, or perhaps the fear of becoming part of Russia's big-brother, hive-pod culture during the 1950s and 60s. Who knows? I still get a little queasy looking at a bowl of noodles.) 

I also think of bacteria, which accounts for approximately 15% of the living biomass on the planet after plants, which account for almost 80%, while the remaining groups, “in descending order, are fungi, archaea, protists, animals, and viruses, which together account for the remaining  approximately 10%.” https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506

So, we’re not the lords of creation we like to think we are, at least in terms of the amount of weight we throw around the place. Me thinks, we need to have a greater respect for plants in the future! (Day of the Triffids, anyone?)

The image of diatoms as ciphers is interesting, and something I recently edited in. A "cipher" is “a secret or disguised way of writing; a code.” (OED, 331) Whose code, and for what purpose is it written? There is an additional meaning of cipher as a “continuous sounding of an organ pipe, caused by a mechanical defect.” I like the image of diatoms continuously sounding their ‘message’ or perhaps their 'music', even if it is just a single note (which suggests that there needs to be additional notes and tonalities to complete the score.) That this is due to a mechanical failure of the organ is music to my Luddite ears!

The harsher imagery of hot lava fields, followed by a drying landscape with emaciated birds and dry seed husks, is certainly problematic, of course.

In the final stanza, our guardian skies, which protect us from the harshness of space and envelop us in their life-giving airs, breathe upon us in the winds. They convey a sense of hope that there will always be life stirring somewhere. Will it be ours? If we’re lucky, humans might be around for a million years or so. We’ll see; if so, we’ll certainly not be alone: The quickening of life is also in the seeds the wind sorts, winnows and then animates in the new growth that follows. 

Diatoms: AMAZING shapes!

*Side note of interest (at least for me) is that, according to Wikipedia, “the entire Amazon basin is fertilized annually by 27 million tons of diatom shell dust transported by east-to-west (easterly) transatlantic winds from the bed of a dried up lake once covering much of the African Sahara.” Huh! Just when I thought I knew everything…  

And this sweet poem, below, popped up in my search engine as I was googling Who Has Seen the Wind. 
Rosetti's poem provides me with a final  after-dinner mint to end this post. I do like it. But how did Google know I liked it?  How!?! Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but I think AI technology is behind it! Gawd help us!
Q: "Siri, how can I be a fully-formed human being and learn to think for myself?"
A: "Stop listening to me all day, moron, and get outside in your fucking garden."

Who Has Seen the Wind?

by Christina Rossetti, 1830 - 1894 
 

Who has seen the wind?

Neither I nor you.

But when the leaves hang trembling,

The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?

Neither you nor I.

But when the trees bow down their heads,

The wind is passing by.

The Dancers