Maybe it has to do with the amphibious,
a step between me, you, and fish brains.

I met a lady one night, a retiree,
this was down in St. Augustine.
When it came time for me to go
she pointed to her garage door.
You know the scene: back door’s strategy.

There on the floor were hundreds, maybe
tens of hundreds of frogs, all
facing the suburbanite’s main exit.

Oh, she smiled at the sight of them.
I smiled too and never saw her again.

(A bit of spontaneous doggerel for one of the few Texans I like.)

Terreson
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http://billknottpoetry.blogspot.com/2009/06/frogpo_16.html

…
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Besides, I would ask how many of the rest of you even have any frog poems? No? Thought so. I win.

.
Evolution
(Intelligent Design)

Overwhelming diversity, constant multiplicity,
extending still complexity, an existential mystery
yet the polarizing entities are questioning reality:
an accident of Being or a Being’s creativity?
Inexplicable Cosmology, quantum relativity,
omnipotent Holy monarchy or irrelevant necessity?

A frog jumps and ripples ring the pond.
A leaf floats up and down upon it.

.
Copyright 2008 – HARDWOOD-77 Poems, Gary B. Fitzgerald
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It was in the first of the two habitats that I noticed something. Hiking up the side of the mountain it seemed to me, and to my suprise, there was no silence. (As I say it was a deep forest environment with forest floor mass so deep I sometimes did not touch the ground and forest composition was such it was starting to return to a climax forest of hemlock and doug fir.) Drawing on the experience in a poem about a hundred year old mining disaster that had occurred in the vicinity, I called it a chorus of girlie voices. But the description is only approximate and I can’t be more exact. Or maybe it was like a chorus of young children, young boys whose voices hadn’t changed yet. I don’t know. I just know I could hear something whenever I was hiking, and over the sound of my own steps. I could hear it on the estate too, but not as sharply. The property abutted a wide clear cut on two sides. While my environment was deeply forested it didn’t extend out as far, which may be relevant.

I suppose it is possible I was experiencing an auditory hallucination. They say too much solitude can mess with the brain. And, in fact, towards the end of the time a towny friend pointed out to me that my behavior was a little strange. Not irrational, exactly, just a little accentuated maybe. (Herzog’s grizly man movie touches on the subject.) But I still remember that sound, that chorus of voices. It certainly seemed real enough to me then.

These days I live in a city. The transition produced what I can only call environment shock. Even more so for my girl dog who was born on the estate and knew nothing else for five years. Fortunately, my job takes me out of town, into the parish, to bee yards mostly situated between bayous. But I don’t hear that chorus here.

Terreson
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Christopher
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I guess the Findhorn plants were talking on other topics.
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I was in Scotland when Findhorn first started, and we all started trying to talk to plants at that time.

The secret is that we have to be awfully quiet ourselves to hear what they say. Also plants talk a lot more when we’re not there at all, so we have to sort of sneak up on ourselves to overhear them–and certainly never tell anybody else what they say.

It’s top secret.

Christopher
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But how much i can allow them in and still protect space for the more natural part of nature is a question. I spent a half hour with a chickweed in this workshop and it touched me in an utterly new way from anything I’ve ever listened to. Definitely different from the jetplane. But I haven’t made that kind of space for a plant before. I want to make more space for the chickweed.

Christopher, thanks—I’m very very happy where it went! That’s part of the Harriet energy, no apologies needed.
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So this is for Annie, an apology.

We human beings are like plants too, we also need a lot of manure to grow.

Take the lotus, flower of love, flower of compassion. In reality the lotus is a very mean plant–it’s large, aggressive and with very ugly personal habits. It grows best in the most noxious mud for a start, and I mean mud that’s the soak away from cesspits, something we don’t experience in the west anymore, fortunately, but which is normal where I live. (You smell the bouquet everywhere!)

And it’s pushy, the lotus, prickly and selfish–it juts up out of the mud and overshadows everything else. Indeed, if you want to welcome some beautiful aquarium fish into your pond, for example, or grow some delicate plants, water lilies for example, you have to tear it up first. But it’s a stubborn infestation, the lotus, and takes a number of seasons to get rid of. A lotus never just shuts up and goes.

And yet, right in the middle of its mess, flowers the best in us.

Christopher
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Fortunately not always, but sometimes–when I’m in one of my lesser, more critical moods.

What we have to do is remind ourselves that there’s another side too, that life really isn’t about fairness anyway–or like I used to say to my children, not fair is not allowed here. Because in the context of a life Mucius Scaevola (sp?) really was freer than the emperor, even pinned and tortured in his barrel. He really was–and would be still.

Like Simone Weil, who chose the barrel of her own free will.

Indeed, if you examine the lives of the majority of women in unexamined cultures, I mean the actual lives of the women, what happens in their hearts, in their soul, you’ll find that despite the restrictions their lives are still richer and even freer than the half-life of their galivanting, conscienceless men.

But I do feel that religions that abuse women aren’t really valid on any human or spiritual level, at least not any more. On the other hand, religions that aren’t difficult enough aren’t worth their salt either, and too much hugging puts me off too. Or too much good blather.

Oh dear.

Christopher
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The Sutras are so bare they’re boring–they just give you a lot of detailed instructions about what to do (be mindful) and not to do (lie), assuming that if you follow these simple instructions you’ll find out all the answers for yourself. Even the question of God is never addressed by the Buddha, and indeed there’s nothing whatever in his teaching to believe.

Reincarnation was a Hindu belief that never got quite eradicated, yet ‘Buddhists’ all over the world base their practice upon it–”acquiring merit,” it’s called. Same with all those things the Tibetans are so famous for, speed walking, flying–that’s all just old shamanistic hat. The Buddha forbad the development of all psychic powers, period–nothing, he said, develops the ego faster.

Some Tibetans even feel that’s why 1959 happened, that Tibet had it coming.

Spiritual egotism, trying to hold a spiritual tradition intact!

Christopher
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In Gravity and Grace Simone Weil says:

“God could create only by hiding himself. Otherwise there would be nothing but himself.

Holiness should then be hidden too, even from consciousness in a certain measure. And it should be hidden in the world.”

But that’s hard, as is everything about her life, and everything she says.

On a much more accessible but perhaps even more profound level, Louise Glück writes in The Wild Iris,

We never thought of you
whom we were learning to worship.
We merely knew it wasn’t human nature to love
only what returns love.

Even the Catholic Mass can astonishingly proclaim, “Oh sacred fault, oh blessed sin of Adam,” and there have been plenty of sects in which Judas is revered as the highest and holiest of the disciples, for without Judas sacrificing himself, his whole soul, his whole life and reputation, the great act of redemption could never have taken place!

Ouch, but tell me it isn’t so!

Also, Eileen, did you notice that pronoun in my little thing about the monk in my family? “It [being a monk] deliberately imposes loneliness and silence on a person who has been conditioned all his life never to be alone or quiet!”

Because in the Theravada (the Hinayana, or southern Buddhism) a woman cannot be ordained as a nun at all, and if she still wants to join the temple and take the monastic vows she has to stay outside the holy space and cook and clean for the men inside. Indeed, it’s felt in the culture that a woman can only make progress toward enlightenment if her son becomes a monk, which many men do just for that reason. Sons do it early in their lives too, otherwise they’d have to share that merit with their wives, and every man wants it all to go to his mother.

So it’s always the same. Religion may be organized by the men but it’s lived by the women.

Still, ouch yet again.

Christopher
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Paul Winter’s tremendous Missa Gaia. (I heard it performed live in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in the late 80s, I think. Is anybody still interested?)

Or Olivier Messaien.

Just wanted to say that where I live the women, all beautiful, all smiling, speak in tiny little-girl voices, way up there, and if they did eat butter it would certainly not melt in their mouths.

In public at least.

In private they shout, indeed the more comfortable they feel the louder it gets–so much so that I often feel the women are just about to come to macho blows.

Audrey Hepburn as the Wife of Bath!

No place that you know is ever what it seems to somebody else!

Christopher
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Association train (noise noise NOISE NOISE) —

do nothing but listen –

Hillary Clinton’s listening tour –

Bill Clinton’s gift of a Whitman book to the young woman with whom he was having an affair –

(noise noise NOISE NOISE) — and who complains about that? The Grinch, that’s who!

Because . . .

the NOISE can be JOYFUL

(it’s in the Bible — “Make a joyful noise” — the Psalms — poems/songs — of David, the harpist/King) –

on my bookshelf, next to Cage’s book SILENCE, another book of music-polemic,

NOISE, by Jacques Attali –

and the equation of NOISE and resistance to the ruling class –

or as Public Enemy said, BRING THE NOISE –

the story of the middle-class suppression of lower-class NOISE is chronicled in “The Battle of Christmas” too, the middle-class-ization, family-orientation-ization, of Christmas in the 19th century, against lower class noise/revel/wassail,

which survives, slightly, highly regulated, in New Year’s Eve, Halloween, Mardi Gras –

but/and it must be said –

the lower-class noise/revel has a macho vibe — the manly manliness of 19th century urban pop culture –

I love the desert camping too –

and the family hearthside fire –

and the frog chorus (a major tradition of Japanese poetry — books and books — of frog poems) –

the frog chorus rocks me too, when I am able to come across it –

(once on Orcas Island, indelible memory, the frog orchestra, and later that night reciting an anonymous 18th century poem around the campfire) –

once, summer ’85, 2 in the morning, I recorded a duet for harmonica and crickets way out off a country road . . . one of my favorite recordings . . .

also summer ’85, wrote a song for a herd of buffalo that a rich farmer kept, went to the salt lick with a portable recorder to record it with them, a fence between me & the herd, but at the first sound of the music the buffalo split –

LISTENING — YES — the Voices of the Animals and the Wind and the Water — YES — but I love the NOISE too,

(the concerto for car horn and sax quartet by the Billie Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet — marvelous) –

which maybe isn’t too far from what Annie’s saying, with dynamic disequilibrium –

“No sound is dissonant which tells of life” — Coleridge.
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I never heard real silence until I camped in the desert. Walking across the saltflat of Death Valley and up the long alluvial fan into canyons in the Panamint Mountains. Wind, raven’s cry, silence.

It might be a question we could ask about various poets. Yah, yah, we know their words, but what are their silences like?

“I heard a fly buzz when I died.” – Emily
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One of the main problems faced by chiropractors is that most mature human bodies have become a mass of contradictions more than of natural, functional harmonies. Every accident we suffer goes into the mish-mash we know of as ourselves, one imbalance crazily hunkered up against another, and if the inattentive therapist removes the wrong crucial knot the whole cat’s cradle can unravel!

A little like the disintegration of the Soviet Union!

The key to what you say, Annie, is that “the different voices and forces that interact and intersect with each other” can do so “in fertile ways.”

That’s profound indeed. That’s alchemy.

For Thai culture, like most traditional societies, the imperative is a solidarity which discourages the individual from doing anything alone, even reading. Yet for a Thai the pinnacle of human accomplishment is to become a monk–indeed the popular word for a monk, phra, also means a Buddha!

My little nephew has just become a monk at 11, and when he comes home for a visit his father bows down before him and asks for his blessing. Even more astonishing, the little boy’s mother cannot touch him any more, or she him. That’s one of the key rules of the Vinaya, the discipline that all Theravada monks follow.

Indeed, being a monk is the very opposite of everything Thai traditional culture takes for granted in daily life. It deliberately imposes loneliness and silence on a person who has been conditioned all his life never to be alone or quiet!

So it’s all very complicated, what we need, how we grow, what’s healthy. The sickest people I know are on the purest diets, and going organic for most westerners seems to become not only an expensive luxury but selfish!

So silence is an antidote, or not–depending upon the malady.

Christopher
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I don’t think this post is about silence, though it relates to it. At the herbal workshop, I learned a phrase I like a lot which describes the way nature functions and perhaps the way traditional human cultures such as Thai culture function: “dynamic disequilibrium”: different voices and forces that interact and intersect with each other in fertile ways.

Something different from either noise or silence.

But when we have so much noise in our culture (which my herbalist teacher, I think, would define as something like the jet plane, a noise that doesn’t change and isn’t dynamic, alive, or evolving) perhaps we need silence to help us balance out back towards dynamic disequilibrium.

Iain, I think clearly a lot of poetry, and a lot of art (“brutalist” architecture, for example) does seem interested in listening to noise, studying the pathologies of our culture, as you put it. In fact, I would guess that the majority of contemporary art is operating from that perspective. And clearly a lot of people find it worthwhile, so presumably it is performing a ncessary step.
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When are you coming home? There are no crickets singing in the new Poetic Justice forum, but there has been a fair amount of barking and grunting here. The call of Nature … how marvellous it is.
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It is always a wonder to me how us, as people, are able to speak to one another with this language (not only English, language period) we’ve built. And yet we have a hard enough time understanding one another. Or getting our point across as we want it crossed. And yet we’re so sure what it is animals think, what it is they do or do not know. There is such a certainty… I’ve always known that unless we can jump inside another person’s brain we can never fully know them. Only through their energy and their lifely actions. Same with the other animals. The fact that a dog dreams raises a flag to me that the difference between “us” and “them” is quite minimal, you know?

I’ve always enjoyed silence. But aren’t humans kind of predisposed to some sort of noise? From the hum of the womb onward? I guess it’s “unnatural” noise which is an issue, that which interrupts and is unable to feedback.

Talking to a toaster? A microwave? I’ve tried it. Doesn’t work. But I’ve also tried talking to spiders… they are kind of jerks. Birds are sound based creatures and hold the best conversations.

Quick side note: I once saw a bird perched on my car window, looking into the side-view mirror, moving his head this way and that. I watched him for a good ten minutes, then went over to see what he was up too. He fluttered away. I went inside and came back out twenty/thirty minutes later…. and there he was, looking at himself in the mirror. Quite the vain thing he was…
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I was thrilled by that too, so thanks both Mary and Margo!
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(one other I like, near tho’ not quite in the vein: “The wound that comes closest to the sun is lucidity. La blessure la plus rapprochée du soleil est la lucidité. — René Char)
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I’m thinking of “Contact” again, and of the terrible clutter of noise that those big celestial dishes channel in to us. And the irony is that without all that noise there wouldn’t be any message, or if there were a message it wouldn’t make sense.

The deafness I mention at the end is no message.

Being so obsessed with silence is like shutting our eyes because the world is too busy, whereas the world may not be with us enough.

Christopher
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