yellowbird

New words on the wind. Old words discovered.

2011-11-26T05:25:00.000-08:00

Tim called our lunch slumgullion. I could not eat the soup/stew without savouring the word. It seems to be Irish (as is his ancestry), and traditionally made with beef and leftovers. I found this veggie version on the web by Rebecka Evans:

Slumgullion is Cookery Slang that describes an inexpensive stew or a mixture of ground meats and veggies browned in a skillet. You may know this dish by other more common names such as Mulligan stew or Irish stew. Slumgullion has a very old and diverse history. Famous authors, John Muir, and Mark Twain refer to Slumgullion with distaste because it was generally made by the impoverished. My Slumgullion is a vegetarian version based on my mother’s recipe. The intense flavors of dill, red pepper flakes and chive married with the addition of grits bring a new twist to old tradition.

* Prep time: 10 minutes
* |
* Cook time: 15 minutes
* |
* Total time: 25 minutes
* |
* Servings: 6

* 8 ounce(s) of tub Philadelphia 1/3 less fat Chive and Onion Cream Cheese
* 2 medium yellow squash
* 2 medium zucchini
* 5 crimini mushrooms
* 1/2 medium yellow onion
* 2 tbsp. of olive oil
* 1 tbsp. of butter
* 1 cup(s) of quick grits
* 1 1/2 tbsp. of fresh chopped dill weed
* 1/2 tsp. of red pepper flakes

Steps

1. Following manufacturer's instructions, pour 4 cups water into a medium sauce pan and bring to a boil
2. add 1 cup cooked grits and 1 tablespoon butter to boiling water
3. stir to combine and reduce heat to low
4. cook for 5 minutes stirring occasionally
5. whisk in 1 8 ounce tub Philadelphia 1/3 less fat Chive and Onion Cream Cheese, cover and set aside until ready to use
6. heat 1 tablespoon olive oil in a large skillet on medium high heat
7. clean vegetables before slicing
8. add mushroom only to pan and cook without seasoning until golden in color, remove from pan
9. add 1 tablespoon olive oil to hot pan and saute zucchini and yellow squash for 3-4 minutes, season to taste with salt and pepper, remove from pan
10. saute onions in pan until caramelized but still al dente
11. return all vegetables to pan, season with red pepper flakes and 1 tablespoon dill weed, cook for additional 3-4 minutes stirring occasionally
12. season with salt and pepper to taste
13. pour cooked chesse grits into a large serving bowl
14. top grits with cooked vegetables and garnish with remaining 1/2 tablespoon fresh chopped dill

Slumgullion reminds me of rapscallion, jerry mulligan, and other Irishisms. There is something authentic about it. If it's 'supposed' to be made of leftovers, can it really have a recipe?

How many more words (English) are there out there waiting to be chewed on? And why do some words fall behind the sofa?

Google is a great teacher. When I was 16 and living in Leeds I would go hiking at weekends in the Dales. I tried all sorts of things to waterproof my boots including dubbin [must check that out]. But my favorite was neatsfoot oil. Although this was befre my veggie days, I always wondered how many little neats had to be squeezed (or whatever) to make this oil, and what on earth neats are? The other day, I rediscovered the original can of this oil (yup, after 48 years), its label coming a little unstuck. I googled neatsfoot. Serious bad news from Wikipedia: "Neatsfoot oil is a yellow oil rendered and purified from the shin bones and feet (but not the hooves) of cattle. "Neat" in the oil's name comes from an old name for cattle. Today, many[who?] consider the best quality neatsfoot oil to be that which comes from the legs of calves, with no other oils added. Neatsfoot oil is used as a conditioning, softening and preservative agent for leather. In the 18th century, it was also used medicinally as a topical application for dry scaly skin conditions." Footnote: another Wiki article says neats are 'horned oxen'. I think of Sartre: Dirty Hands. And Derrida's critique of good conscience. How many calves have kept my feet dry on the Yorkshire moors? How many more neatsfeet are there out there? Could one (not this one) add neatsfoot oil to slumgullion?

Thanksgiving 2011

2011-11-24T07:50:00.000-08:00

Tim and Chris and I will join the Sanctuary people at Gaby's for Thanksgiving today. We have directions to his place, way down a dead end road somewhere in the woods. In the woods here, I would like to be able to thank the real turkeys, families of 4, 19 etc. just for being here, being alive, and for my/our not needing to eat them. And then I want to thank them for being beautiful, especially the boys, displaying for their lady friends as if they were peacocks. On the radio Roy Blunt Jnr explains the virtues of turkey meat - that it neutrally absorbs so many other flavors (like cranberry). How different from the real bird. And how can we not admit that language is subject to devastating slippage when we use the same word for the real live strutting cock, and the dead white neutral flesh on the plate. I want to start (Re)Occupy Language. Speaking of language, Leopard Zeppard came over yesterday to see about helping me furbish (can we say that) the sauna with cedar benches, walls and ceiling. I'm wondering if sticking with my birth name is not a kind of laziness when I could reinvent myself as I assume Leopard did. Or is it possible that his Mum and Dad were Mr and Mrs Zeppard and they were creative? Does he have brothers and sisters - and would they be big felines (Tiger, Puma) or rhymes? What else rhymes with Zeppard? Edward? Shepherd? I must ask him over lunch at Gaby's. (Or is it Gabby's?.

Tim and Chris are my latest wwoofers, from SF and Miami/Cuba respectively, currently installing a paver floor in the sauna. They are off to Korea in the Spring to teach English. Chris introduced us to her fried plantain yesterday. Mmmm. On the side, Tim is painting stick figures, Chris skulls.

Thanksgiving is a time for family. Reminds me how dispersed I/we are, across continents, seas, time, divorce, and the vagaries of love and other bonds. So we improvise community. And this time 'we' will bring alternative shepherd's pie (beans and split peas etc.) and sweet potato pie to a mixed group of mostly gay veggies and carnivors who have perhaps difference in common.

Last night at 3pm we were woken by lots of barking, with different kinds of barks all intermingled. What was happening? Dogs meet up with hungry coyotes? A canine contestation?. A hermeneutic conundrum! Whatever happened there will be no evidence left this morning as the mist rises over the meadow. Barking? What barking - asked Pinto, the pit bull that last year ate my cat Berserker.

Chronicles

2011-08-07T04:55:00.000-07:00

Listening to Eric Clapton's stunning Chronicles, I realize what a great title this would be for a philosophic-al book. The title itself would solicit a hybrid form of writing - between philosophy and literature. Examples: Calvino, Borges, but also essayists like Montaigne. These would be aporetic performances of quizzical temporality.

"Why I stay in the provinces"

2011-02-21T08:13:00.000-08:00

This is the title of an essay by Heidegger, declining the call to Berlin. Rural life at least here in TN is a strange mix. For families who have roots here, the past meant poverty, hunger, uncertain times. Despite Heidegger's promotion of peasant life, it cannot always have been possible to delight in the world they inhabited with disease, infant mortality, and hunger around the corner. But imagine that life without the anxiety! I'm getting closer.

Cabin Fever, Restablizing Horses

2011-02-21T06:13:00.000-08:00

Today Randall started leveling the site for the new stables. Giant grey rocks sleep beneath the turf and are disturbed after thousands of years by the Giant Clunking BullDozer Machine. Later he will level a site for Cabin II in the top field, which will be wholly self-contained. Solar plus. Rohan sent this pinhole picture of me next to Cabin I.

Peripatetic Sunday

2011-02-20T08:16:00.000-08:00

Going walkabout it is tempting to follow habit and walk accustomed paths. Today I broke with tradition and returned to some old ways. Up to the spring, where the pipe needs mending. Now the electrical connection to the pump needs attention. And the lid, which has rusted through. Lots of downed branches from storms etc. The impulse to tidy is real, if only to bring out lines. Is the picturesque a bad thing? I imagine a series of red painted installations to complement various mossy sites and their velvet green, especially damp 'waterfalls'. Need work parties to clear broken wood etc., and more benches to punctuate walks; benches could host sentences! (See Word Farm). (The Word Farm project could start on Vanderbilt's campus as a temporary exhibition.) YB the Gesamtkunstwerk needs some attention. The Airstream needs moving. Need to construct a focal end to L'Avenue de L'Avenir. The Lookout Hill site needs a small shelter - perhaps a good place for the rotating hut - using a truck axle/wheel, because of the changing wind direction. Then there is the red bridge on the right going up the hill from the house ... I was reading Gary Snyder yesterday, some essays from Back on the Fire (?). He spoke of the need for (in poetry and in life?) this and that, AND wit. Perhaps wit opens up a broader category I do care about - by which e.g. the picturesque could be interrupted. Bridges that lead nowhere? Unfinished sentences? New ruins (playing with Clough Williams-Ellis), architect of Portmeirion, who also built ruins in fields, gates to nothing. This is another kind of dynamism to that wrought by participatory activity, inviting people to engage, interact with an installation. Building in wit, or incompleteness allows the object to begin that movement itself, frustrating expectations etc. But then there are delightful and merely annoying forms of frustration. CWE was an interesting guy, wrote for the National Trust, lamented the loss of a former age, probably a Conservative in many senses: he wrote "I think that Beauty, The Strange Necessity - as Rebecca West once called it - is something that matters profoundly to humanity, and that unless the race of man perishes from the earth, it will increasingly value that Grace, will seek it, and will ultimately attain it." Perhaps we need the picturesque as a lure to what will enjoyably confound it. What if the Greek temple (not) at the end of the Avenue were a two dimensional facade? Can I use mirrors in the landscape? But perhaps all this talk of interruption is premature. First one needs to master, somewhat, the classical rules of form etc. This seems especially true of landscape.

A new ART PROJECT:: Wordscape (see YB webpage)

2011-02-09T09:44:00.000-08:00

Poetic PereGRINation

Words in landscape.
Not signs, just words.
Like flowers or leaves.
Strung,
stuck on sticks,
strewn across the turf,
sprouting from the ground.
English words
Spanish words,
French words,
German words,
Indian words
words from imaginary Borgesian languages,
words that might have delighted Joyce or Lear.

A cornucopia of word-smithery.
Word-birds that alight on your shoulder.

Slow down for a word
set under an Osage Orange tree*
Let images gather.

Wander freely
from word to word
with no map.
A poem may happen.

Plant a word.
Plough the Word Farm.
Walk the Woodbury Wordscape.

___________

* Aka
Horse apple,
Hedge apple,
Hedge Ball,
Bois D'Arc
Bodark,
Bodock
Osage Apple,
Mock Orange
Yellow Wood,
Palo de Arco, Ayac [Indian],
Maclura pomifera [Latin])

Soft Time:Heliotrope III

2011-01-15T09:24:00.000-08:00

We installed this piece at the Arts Center of Cannon County just last week. Lots of people have seen and like it and Evan and Donald are printing up some flyers. It will give me some sort of art presence in the community, which will be fun.

New Year, New Goats, Dog News

2011-01-15T08:50:00.000-08:00

On January 1st, two new goats arrived. In the snow. Bad timing? They shivered, they were licked, they were left, they suckled. So far they have survived. The coyotes are reported to be having pups. How are they to be fed?
Wonderful Zip disappeared a couple of weeks ago. My heart fell. I cannot seem to keep a dog. The food was left uneaten. But a few days later he reappeared with another dog. It felt like a Chinese 'good luck' story, in which every event changes its valency with the subsequent event. I assumed he had been sowing his wild oats. His new friend was him/herself the product of some wild oating - mostly Great Pyrenees but some St Bernard, or something else in his bigger head. They seemed good friends - but were they boy and girl - it wasn't clear. But the new dog seemed perfectly happy barking at me (nicely) with the goats behind him, defending them alongside Zip. These two dogs, however, are sometimes there, sometimes not. But the new dog is making Zip a little less stand-offish.
Today I went to see Bob and Carol, to give them their New Year's banana bread. It turns out that my new dog is their Rex, that Rex has been 'breeding' Zip, (that Zip is a girl), and that the two of them are being fed at many of the places on their daily round, including Estelle Reed's where there are two more dogs. And that Zip kills ducks. My picture of my severe Kantian duty-bound Zip is well and truly shattered. Actually she is a party girl who likes life on the town, and does goat-protection as image-enhancing charity work. Still I love her.

Gaudy hornworms & sandal butterflies

2010-09-07T06:01:00.001-07:00

Exhibit A, rare footage of the old sandal butterfly that can only complete its lifecycle by feasting on smelly sandals curing in the sun.

Exhibit B [see below]: Friends and family of this guy ate my tomato crop. Is it dressed for Xmas?

Is it spawning more of the same? No, and no! The white capsules are a parasitic infestation. I am ashamed that I let out a cheer ... "A natural predator of the tomato hornworm is a tiny beneficial insect called the braconid wasp. This wasp lays its eggs inside the hornworm. As they hatch, they eat their way out, killing the hornworm in the process. It's a bit off-putting to see this creature on your plants, but you're better off letting him be and letting the wasps do their job. Once they hatch, they'll be enough braconid wasps to keep your garden hornworm free."
Go wasp go!

Hot shit!

2010-08-30T07:20:00.000-07:00

Researching alternatives to flush loos, this looks likes the most interesting way forward both for its introduction to the microbiological science of composting (esp thermophilic bacteria), and Jenkins' relentless (humorous) attacks on fecophobes:

THE HUMANURE HANDBOOK, A Guide to Composting Human Manure, 3rd edition, by Joseph Jenkins - 255 pages, 19 photos, 42 tables and charts, 55 drawings, indexed.

Here is a link to a very simple explanation of how it works, with pix. http://www.saskwastereduction.ca/resources/Composting/comp-toilet.html

No more concessions to out-of-sight, out-of-mind. But it is hard not to still enjoy the thrill of the sucking jet loo emptying prowess of the toilets in big box stores. You feel as if you are a full participant in the Space Age. Another seductive illusion.

Cabin Pix

2010-08-30T06:47:00.001-07:00

Three days later. Now I can get obsessed about details, including some sort of vine covered deck, both for visual balance and .... pleasure.

Artists Retreat Cabin #1

2010-08-25T14:08:00.000-07:00

Today, Josh Leith, Don and Jeremy started work on Artist Cabin #1. Finally I took the plunge. 12'x20', including a small bathroom and kitchen area, with undetermined plans for a water supply, a sawdust loo, and solar power. Just a shell, but small enough that finishing it out ought to be a breeze. I will slow everything down by insisting on making an outside door myself. The cabin will sit above the old farm pond amidst shelves of limestone.

The fantasy of the ever vigilant goatdog

2010-08-24T09:46:00.000-07:00

I went up to feed my faithful goatdog Zip at dusk last night\ He was not around, so I left his food in the usual bowl\ This morning I checked, and it had not been touched\ I went hunting the goats, finally finding them under some shady trees\ But no Zip\ He had been eaten by coyotes! Testosterone had wandered him off (I had been warned)! Or perhaps he was lying injured, unable to woof\ Somehow I was failing my dogs\ My heart sank\ I wandered around - perhaps this ever alert guard dog was on higher ground surveying the scene, watching me even as I was looking for him\ Then I noticed a small patch of white in the grass not far from the goats\ My heart sank again\ Was it perhaps his limp body? I went closer\ He opened his eyes out of deep sleep, got to his feet, and walked off/ Then he turned around: "Is there some problem" he asked?

Hegel and the Dog

2010-08-17T08:43:00.000-07:00

Hegel distinguishes humans from animals by pointing out that we eat, while animals feed (essen/fressen)* Faced with food, we humans may contemplate the prospect of eating, while an animal will just plunge in and gobble up his food*

Zip has clearly not read his Hegel* Last night at dusk I went to feed him in his usual dish at the front of the barn* His habit is to lurk nearby and then eat when I move away* But he was not there* I filled the bowl anyway, and then as I was leaving, I heard him barking from the back of the barn* It struck me there just might be something going on* Round the back, a goat had his horns stuck in the corner of the shed and was bleating like crazy* I released him, as Zip looked on* What was it - duty? a 'problem'? something out of the ordinary? distress in one of his charges (the goats)? Whatever it was it was more important than food, even for a hungry dog*

On a similar note: "Hegel once remarked jokingly that shredding learned books and mixing them with the food of your dog will not increase the intelligence of your dog even one iota"* But reflecting on when dogs sacrifice food for other values might increase ours!

Yellow Bird / Giverny

2010-08-11T15:20:00.000-07:00

In setting up Yellow Bird I had partly in mind Monet's garden(s) at Giverny* Three big differences - YB is much bigger and more interesting topologically* Giverny had no goats, or deer, and lots of flowers (connected!)* And Monet was, well, Monet, and did not get his reputation from his garden* And he had (I believe) lots of gardeners*

Giverny went through long periods of neglect, and it is a miracle it still exists* Only now is it open for visitors* YB will not have lily ponds, or flower gardens, but in some ways it should be just as interesting, not least as an ambulatory place* with sculpture trails* The one feature of Monet's original I would dearly love to copy is the Japanese bridge* Damn it, I remember it as red! Here is an image:It is planned to go between the two lakes* I think I need to get on and have someone make it, as he did! Here is the general plan of the gardens at Giverny* I need to develop a similar such map for YB*

"Claude Monet (1840-1926) expressed the opinion that he was good for two things in life – painting and gardening. Today, his paintings fetch record prices at auction, and his restored 5 acre (2 hectare) garden at Giverny, France – an hour north of Paris by car – attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.

The garden is composed of two equal parts – Monet’s flower garden immediately in front of his house, and his water garden on an adjoining property, today connected by an underground tunnel to avoid visitors crossing a busy highway that in Monet’s day was a railroad track.

Monet declared his water garden his greatest work of art, and he delighted in conducting visitors around like the emperors of Imperial Japan when they entertained important dignitaries. He was also visited by numerous journalists who captured his thoughts as they toured his garden, and took photographs so that today we have an accurate record of what the water garden looked like at its peak of perfection, and why he designed it the way he did, as a cup garden and a subject to paint in all seasons and under all lighting conditions." (Derek Fell)

For more information about Giverny:
http://giverny.org/gardens/fcm/stanford/index.htm

As for RED bridges, here is a possibility:

The Principal/Agent Problem

2010-08-11T08:22:00.000-07:00

The Principal/Agent problem is an issue in economics: how to get the person you are hiring to do what you want them to do, rather than what they would rather do. Two interesting examples from recent bush-hogging. Jay started bush-hogging the big pasture, when my priority was to redo the trails, which we then did. Then Randall went off into the backwoods finding new mini-fields to clear that I did not even know were there. And he sorted out problems with the bush-hog that I did not know existed. This guy knows more about what I want than I do. Do economists discuss this variant of the P/A 'problem'?

Space, and the Magic of Place

2010-07-28T18:45:00.000-07:00

Before 7am this morning Randall Bogle was bulldozing the last section of the Japan loop, winding up the hill from the road he cut two days ago, to join the road from the old Sunny Slope entrance, negotiating rocky outcrops and sturdy trees, and maintaining where possible a gentle gradient. We retraced the whole route back to the house, dressing it up a little. I am not sure whether google earth can see what we did. But it did feel like drawing lines on the landscape with a very big brash brush. At the moment it is all very raw, with broken and wounded trees everywhere, dislodged rocks, and random piles of earth. With wind, rain, gravity and the action of countless living things, this harshness will heal.

We need benches by the road, meditation sites. I talked to Donald at the CC Arts Center about a bench competition for local artisans, with follow-up installation. Must look up some images on google. And in head.

Magic: YB can increasingly become magical both in itself (moonlit paths) and also as a canvas for magical activity and designation. Space turns into place, and the next step is magic.

The Way to Japan, and Beyond

2010-07-28T18:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Randall Bogle cut and restored the 'old road' to what was once a small house on the NW end of Yellow Bird, and is now evidenced only by a stone chimney, and a stone fence surrounding a more or less circular plot. The mystery is that only parts of an old road were at all obvious, and we had to forcibly invent bridging sections. I have ventured there a number of times, and a few years ago planted bamboos both on that site and further down the wet weather creek. Two huge osage orange trees had fallen down, and, with some roots still feeding the fallen giants, it had shot up again vertically with new trunks. I had thought to accommodate these monsters artistically, but the dozer-power we had was too much to resist using and Mr Bogle lifted and drove these hulks off-site, with much splitting, crunching and crashing of limbs, and huge branches waving their protesting green tops in the air. We had thought that cutting the road might involve compensating for immoveable rocky shelf by moving soil around, but in fact there was good soil depth everywhere and the dozer work went very smoothly. Buoyed-up by our success I resolved to plough on, and we opened up a way through the strip of bottom land, below SS Rd, and on through. Tomorrow, I will ask Randall to bulldoze up the hill at the far end and reconnect to the road inside the entrance to Sunny Slope. This will give us an entirely new walking/4-wheeling-off-road driving loop, and some beautifully different scenery. I call it Japan because of the bamboo I planted down there. [This conceit is stolen from Osgood Mackenzie's Scottish Garden at Inverewe, Ross-shire, carved from windswept moorland on a rocky peninsula beside Loch Ewe, one section of which is called 'Japan' (another 'America'!)] Bogle says it's ideal copperhead country, but I have yet to see these snakes. And now there will be a 9' clear path through the area, with bamboo leaning overhead. The old house site, which Joe D recalls was deliberately burned after becoming derelict in the 40s or so, will make a perfect place for a pagoda, and a particular quality of peace. There is debate about whether this is the house in which a young boy died in the tornado in the 30s, or whether it was across the road I must ask Louise Melton, who was born on YB, and whose long-term memory is as good as her short-term is bad. There is said to be a spring on the corner of the plot. Who would build a house without a spring!

Goat arithmetic

2010-07-20T19:50:00.000-07:00

Molly was one of the missing, part of the reduction of numbers from 13 to 10. A day later who should turn up again, but Molly plus two new guys on the block. Here they are. Back to 13.

Berzerker in memoriam

2010-07-19T12:26:00.000-07:00

This morning Tom Bean's dog Pinto killed Berzerker in the far corner of the basement where B had sought refuge under boards and wire and other material. Tom said Pinto hated cats and had killed two already after once being scratched on the face by a cat. When I found B he looked fine, eyes open etc. But he was already a little cold, only five minutes after his last plaintive miaow. I wonder if he had died of shock - he still seemed in one piece. I attach a post mortem image, scarily bright. I can only imagine the snakes, the squirrels, the mice, the birds, the moths, the lizards all celebrating tonight at the demise of the Feline Stalker* But he was MY small animal killer, and my friend, and I will miss him.

Yesterday, I went to see the goats, still reduced in numbers from 13 to 10! Where was Zip? He was over by the shelter on the left of the lake, where the goats often hang out* When I got close to him, he ran off to join the goats. I found one dead goat, middle-sized, exuding a noxious stench. This morning I went looking for a saw-mill, and found again Robinson's mill. Could not help recalling meeting Mr Robinson, still bent double after a childhood accident in which a tree had fallen on him and broken his body. What revenge to have started a sawmill. Anyway he subsequently died, and his mill is now just a buyer of timber.

Steely Dan Thoreau, my not-very-feral barn cat, wants to be with me, even waiting on the bank plaintively while I swim* Two 'moral' dilemmas: 1. Can I bring him down from the barn to the house so soon after B's demise? Would that not disrespect the memory of Mr B? 2. Should I really separate him from his companion/brother? Should I bring both or neither? I could bring both, and then get more feral cats (always in need of a home).

I am worried I am getting immured to death as it is happening all around me. At 9am Berzerker was stretched out next to my laptop, interfering with my hand on my mouse. At 9:30am he was gone, saved at least from terror, furry but getting cold. RIP Mr B

Death mat (2)

2010-07-16T19:43:00.000-07:00

Visceral Offering (Cat Art)

Death mat (1)

2010-07-16T08:23:00.000-07:00

Remains of the day

I washed squirrel hair and bones
Off the death mat at the door
And left it on the deck to dry
With Berzerker looking on

Later in the day I found
Seven blue butterflies
Feasting on death's nectar
With Berzerker looking on

Sometimes a tower is just a tower

2010-06-27T10:18:00.000-07:00

Last year (!!) I marked out the six spots for the deep holes into which the trimmed cedar trees were to be slotted. I have waited and waited for the soil to be dry enough for the heavy drilling truck to be able to make it w/o sinking into the mud. Meantime the markings faded.

This morning it took an hour to remark the spots, using the precious early morning coolth from 6:30-7:30. Zip heard me hammering stakes and barked-up the valley. Good dog. I am trying to creep up on big projects so they do not seem quite so daunting. Trouble is there is heavy rain on many an afternoon. Will conditions ever be right?

Why a tower? Rilke writes: "Are we here perhaps just to say: house, bridge, well, gate, jug, fruit tree, window-- at most, column, tower... but to say, understand this, to say it as the Things themselves never fervently thought to be."

Am I going too far - wanting to build a tower, plant fruit trees, construct a (Japanese) bridge, and a column ("Covenant", spanning the Gaza/Israeli wall)?

I know the way of words, and honor it. But there is something about a tower not found in a 'tower'. Is it just a guy thing?

Inappropriate speculation

2010-06-19T04:03:00.001-07:00

A propos of my BBC blog entry suggesting it might be possible that Wayne Rooney was taking something to control his temper, (see yesterday) I received this email this morning: "Dear BBC Blog contributor, Thank you for contributing to a BBC Blog. Unfortunately we've had to remove your content below. Inappropriate speculation." And to think this is the first time I ever blogged the Beeb! Could it perhaps be true? No-one else can explain his sluggish performance.

Apologia pro vita mia

2010-06-18T19:02:00.000-07:00

[with apologies to the Cardinal]

Night has fallen. As I sit down with a glass of sparkling water in my study out at Yellow Bird, it just crosses my mind, just faintly, that even my friends may not understand what I am up to, what the stakes are. So I thought I would sketch a Day in the Life of this two-legged, just to bridge the gap, if such there is. Sartre once recommended a life of total transparency. I would not go that far. But I could be more forthcoming than I am, so here goes.

6:20 a.m. 6 a.m. is the official time I get up. Sometimes I do wake up at exactly 5:55, microwave some of yesterday's coffee in a glass, and I am at my small bar table desk by 6pm. Often, like today it is a bit later. I open the front and back doors to let the cool air through, and open the garage door downstairs to allow the gasoline vapors from the various bits of lawn equipment to dissipate. Today, this Dr Dolittle is greeted by a gift from Berzerker on the back Rat Mat - a small beheaded bird.

6:20 - 9:30. Yesterday I read from Rilke's New Poems, and biographical intros by Leishman and Bayley. As well as short pieces by Borges, and Barthes. And Calvino's Mr Palomar. I am working on a book called Things at the Edge of the World - a project it seems I began 10 years ago. I plan a longish initial chapter (or two) laying out the general idea of a fractal ontology - of worlds within worlds, each centered on a 'thing' - followed by short essays on 20+ such things, ranging from God to cat to 9/11. I am re-reading these authors both to remind myself of the importance of style, and, in the case of Rilke, because he shares an interest in Things (reflected in his writing about Cezanne's realism). I realized this morning that there was something of a tension between the phenomenological approach which would expand our sense of the things before us by reference to the intentional 'acts' by which we constitute them, and the openness to the delightful complexity of the real that Rilke is recommending. So I wrote a section of a few pages that should go into my theoretical introduction, trying to show these two approaches are in fact compatible, at least if we interprete Rilke heuristically.

Before getting down to writing, I made a list of the major practical projects I had promised to complete this summer - somewhat in despair that they are not getting done - and vowed (again) to make progress on them. Finish sauna, erect tower, commission writer's cabin etc etc.

Then breakfast at 9:30. This schedule really works. If I have breakfast when I get up, I am too woozy to think. I make more coffee. While its brewing I take the kitchen scraps down to the garden to compost. I bury it under a thick layer of last Fall's Nashville leaves currently mulching the raised beds my New Zealand wwoofers bequeathed to me when they left in the Spring. I inspect the zucchini, tomatoes and water melon, and try NOT to get sucked into serious gardening. I am just waiting for the coffee to brew. I once asked Paul Ricoeur the secret of his productivity, and he said he wrote roughly from 6-1 every day, did correspondence after lunch, and spent the evening with friends. I'm trying at least to imitate part 1. I keep a separate yellow pad by my side as I'm writing to soak up the distracting thoughts - people I need to email, repairs I need to make, things I need to buy. After lunch I can either keep writing, or turn to this list. Today I drank a lot of coffee, kept writing until about 1:30, then made myself some lunch (avocado, bread and cheese, thick soup), and caught up with NPR news. After lunch I googled various philosophical references to Things that haunt the recesses of my mind. With my bad memory for detail, google is a godsend. I found various Heidegger references, the source for Bishop Butler's "Everything is what it is and is not another Thing" and so on. And I kept in touch with a live text feed of England's second World Cup soccer match (against Algeria). This, it seems was an abysmal showing by England. The result was a goalless draw, and fans (who had spent thousands of pounds to get to South Africa) booed them off the field. I posted my speculation on the Phil McNulty blog - that Rooney was 'on something' (quite legal, like beta-blockers) to temper his temper, which took the edge of his game, and because he is such a focus, the whole team collapsed around him. My entry was referred for further consideration!!

At 3pm, I took an hour's siesta. Amazing, with a gentle fan overhead, how good that feels. I'm not using air conditioning, even in this heat. But the fans are indispensable.

4pm: time for tea - I brought back lots of tea bags from Bangladesh. I THINK they taste different, but it may just be my imagination. And whole grain bread from the Turnip Truck, with honey and with peanut butter. Woodbury is hopeless for bread - indeed for good food of any sort. Is rural America all this culinarily deprived? This is not some relativist value judgement; it's a sad truth.

After tea, another gift on the Rat Mat. This time, a small crested bird. I can tell because this one was not beheaded. Perhaps that's just a morning thing. It lay there intact, feet in the air, as if having its own siesta. But I could not wake it. I set about doing some "small things around the house". I transferred some young seedlings (more tomatoes, squash etc.) into pots; I hosed down the recently purchased lawnmower that needs to be returned under warranty because it has seized up under heavy use; I repaired a mysterious rectangular hole in the deck that has always been there (now it looks like a lovingly patched deck), almost Japanese. I restrung a hops plant that is supposed to be covering the deck with its leaves. I bombed the four-wheeler up to the first cabin-site and chain-sawed up a large cedar branch that had fallen on the pile of floor timber. I went down to the barn and fed corn to the goats, who had already assembled at the sound of my engine. Zip, my new Great Pyrenees puppy, actually followed me around the back of the barn to the dog sized entrance where I feed him. And I think he finally realizes that I am the regular source of his chow. I do not want to be friends - see the WALDO problem in earlier posts - but somehow, minimally, I need to be able to handle him so he can get his shots etc. He does look SO cute. The substitute ignition switch on the four wheeler broke at the ridge-top cabin-site. Fortunately I managed to nurse the machine back to the house (about half a mile) and soldered it back together, much to my relief. I was tempted just to park it in the basement and attend to the problem tomorrow, mañana. But I remembered something Schweitzer once said, running a clinic in what was then French Equatorial Africa. He did not pause between one chore and the next, he just kept going.

Schweitzer - organist, physician, philosopher, pacifist - is something of a model for me. Ditto Leonardo, with his painting, his anatomical investigations, and his machines. And then Wendell Berry, farmer and poet. I guess I'm committed to a version of the Renaissance ideal. When chatting to WB at Vanderbilt, we talked seamlessly about goats and coyotes, as well as the ethics and poetry of place. I fantasize sometimes about living the life of a pure writer. There is something about Roland Barthes - academic, writer, lived with his mother and for whom, it seems, words were his whole world - that is deeply attractive. But I am too deeply wedded to sensuousness, to materiality, to shaping and creating, to exploring and mending, to protecting and encouraging - hence the shape of my day - making, fixing and growing things. And if Barthes had been a tad more worldly perhaps he would not have been run over by a laundry truck. But then again, he would not have back-ache from hauling things, nor bruises from falling over. I imagine that physical exercise will keep me healthy, and that engaging with matter in all its richness will feed my writing with images. I share Rilke's almost spiritual appreciation of things, stuff. But the word spiritual suggests we need to add a layer, like salt on food, to bring out what is there. If, as Blake put it, we cleansed the doors of perception, would we need to add anything? Perhaps we need to acknowledge our breaks from the dulling power of habit.

As dusk approaches, four crows kick up a squawk on the newly mowed grass outside the garden fence under my study window, pecking and scrimmaging. Shall I compare them to a dysfunctional family of umbrellas?

This evening I wrote emails to graduate students, to friends, to people connected with various art projects, and I wrote this blog, to try to explain myself a bit better. I worry about whether Yellow Bird is just a private fantasy, or whether it can have the wider buy-in that I want and need for it. It's not NORMAL to have a project like this. But I keep saying to myself: this is your dream, you actually have the chance to make it happen! And so it continues. Across the fields, Jacob ("Dream Builders") is completing a small house for my neighbor. I think I will ask him to help construct the first Writer's Cabin. And then perhaps finish off the cob sauna.

Come by sometime. After lunch.

Walls and fences

2010-06-13T18:52:00.000-07:00

Last week, after the Israeli commando raid on Gaza relief boats I constructed (planning stage) large pieces of sculpture that would effectively protest against such walls everywhere. Including the 2000 mile barrier between Mexico and the US. Thesis: every wall is the mark of a political failure. Treats people like animals ...

Back at YB, the top of the barn is becoming 'pelleted' - somehow the goats are getting up there. They have already found a way into most of the lower area. I think they have demolition equipment hidden in the woods. (Why do I go to such doggy lengths to protect them? A mystery.) So I spent dusk fencing off all their access points to the barn. They have other places they can get shade. Like the sauna - aaaargh I have to fence that off too! Fortunately their pellets when dried and collected are good fertilizer.

So I clearly believe in fencing - treating animals like ... animals. If I could reason with them, I would. In justification: I am fencing them out of prime shelter (the barn) for which I have other uses, directing them towards more suitable spaces, and fencing them IN to about 170 acres. They are getting a GREAT deal. I am fencing them out of my orchard - they have eaten my fruit trees - for the same reason. They don't need to eat the bark and leaves of young apple trees, and when they do they kill them. Ditto the deer out of my garden.

Playpens are good for kids. Can't get away from it - I am a fence-paternalist when it comes to kids and creatures.

And they are all mine!

2010-06-12T13:37:00.000-07:00

Down by the sauna, early in the morning. Identity is everything. Zip knows who he is, what he is, where he should be. He has found his place. I only worry if a big coyote should turn up. When Zip is bigger, he will eat coyotes for breakfast. But now he himself might need help from his big-horned friends.

True Shaggy Dog story

2010-06-08T13:12:00.000-07:00

No one who has been following these pages will forget the story of Waldo. After Buddy disappeared, I needed a new goat dog to protect the herd against coyotes. I found 'Waldo' who had lived with goats for the two years of his life. When he arrived, I befriended him with treats and cuddles. But I also explained to him that his job was (like Buddy's) to stay with the goats and look after them. He was introduced to the herd, tied up near the barn, and coralled with them for two weeks. He was not interested. And they just kept running away when he bothered to approach them. Finally I relented and invited him into the house. He immediately peed on the planter, and I hurriedly escorted him out. Though we did connect at some level, we were not really communicating. And he left. He found another family across the hills. I brought himn back twice. But he returned to them. I was about to travel on and off for weeks, so I gave up.

A few days ago, I went to see him. He was tied up because he had savaged the neighbor's dog when that dog had threatened his goats ($300 vets bills). His new owners were getting him fixed to calm him down. He had started creating his own herd, on four occasions bringing them in his mouth unweaned kids, to be bottle-fed.

Last week someone advertised a Great Pyreenes puppy on craigslist. I collected him in a trash can with a wire lid, and locked him up in the barn overnight with food and water. He had hardly ever had human contact, but he uttered not even a growl. Next morning he was gone. Disconsolate, but resigned to goat-dog-failure, I thought I would take a tour of the lake on the quad. Down by the sauna, there were all the goats. And the new puppy, just hanging out. I fed the goats corn near the barn, and he came with them. I tried addressing him personally - no interest at all. He is the exact reverse of Waldo. The guy (Steve) who supplied him gave me this advice: "Treat him just like a cat" - at the most a pat on the head. Don't befriend him. He will hang out with the goats day and night and defend them to the death. I think I will call him Zip. He was the last of a litter of 10, 1/4 Anatolian Shepherd (Karabash), 3/4 Great Pyrenees: father Sampson, mother Annie. When the other pups were being given away, he had escaped. But "Houdini" seemed too long to shout across the valley, and didn't really abbreviate.

Treat him like a cat? Not sure how one should treat a cat. Steely Dan Thoreau, erstwhile feral rescue cat, is the most affectionate creature imaginable. And, as if he were a dog, will come on long walks, jumping through the long grass. Could YB be a place where species meet and exchange characteristics?

Zip is about 6 months old. I am not sure he is a goat-dog, more a dog-goat. He clearly THINKS he's a goat. The problem is feeding him. Any food I put out the goats will eat if they can. I am experimenting with a gap in the barn corral that only he can get in. His food seems to be going. Have the racoons found it? Watch this space.

Whatever happened to March and April?

2010-05-23T08:24:00.000-07:00

If to be is to blog, I stopped being for three months. How did that happen? I went on a world conference-art-travel blitz, burning aviation fuel as if flying was about to go dodo. I went to Baton Rouge, Richmond, San Francisco, Bangladesh, England, Tasmania, Richmond (again), and Chicago - all in three months, while teaching too. YB became the home base I took for granted, and ignored. Waldo settled in with a new family, Miss Jean Brodie and Steely Dan Thoreau stopped being feral cats, and settled into a life of rodent control in the barn, ducks Daphne and Bellerophon survived with some unknown anti-coyote strategy (perhaps the coyotes know Bs reputation - "slayer of monsters"), the goats continued to ebb and flow reproductively, and in the Great Rain that flooded Nashville, the lake and pond here filled up like never before. Snapping turtles now sunbathe on the upturned blue duck-motel that floats on the pond - my unappreciated safe-haven for the ducks.

Not only did I stop blogging for three months, I also missed the start of the gardening season. No early tomatoes in pots etc. - and this in the first season of my new raised beds (courtesy of Daniel and Audrey) and the other beds dressed with leaves and horse manure. I bought half a doz each of Lemon Boy and Bradley tom plants (mistaking the latter for Brandywine, an heirloom beefsteak variety, but they seem also to be an oldtime favorite), and buried them deep in the first raised bed. [It was a mistake, but I welcome the unintended, as Derrida said we could welcome Lefebure, a surname resulting from a mistranscription of Lefebvre, which actually means something (smith/metal worker)]. Now I have bought cheap packets of most of the usual suspects: eggplant, zucchini, cantaloupe, water melon, squash, yellow and green beans, arugula (yeah!)[= rocket, in England], green pepper, carrots, beets, other veggies, basil, and various flowers. I will try to get them in tonight, in the cool of the evening. For my sake and their's.

I ran over a 4'+ long snake yesterday that had already been run over, just down the drive. It has dark red saddle splotches on an off-white background. Google identified it for me as a corn snake. I have always assumed that it was so named because it lived in corn fields. But the more usual explanation is that 'corn' refers to the checkerboard pattern of black and white squares on its underbelly, resembling the alternation of corn kernels. This snake is essential a small rodent constrictor. I was told that dead snakes can still bite, just as headless chickens can run (but can their heads squark?). This one, having been run over twice, was too dead for that. And they are apparently gentle souls when alive, unless you are a mouse, on the receiving end of a 'big hug'.

After lunch, I chanced upon a largish low flat light-brown animal scooting towards my house. Google research suggests it was a groundhog (Marmota monax) aka a woodchuck or whistle-pig, and in some areas a land-beaver.

The major event today was the return of Heliotrope from Richmond, my 36' diameter sunflower-shaped floating sculpture. Jay and Steve retrieved it - 600 miles each way. They started out with my black truck and trailer, but had to turn round and trade trucks after 50 miles with spewing transmission fluid and black smoke giving a big thumbs down. I will float it in the lake here - putting it out to pasture, so to speak.

Yellow Bird is a grand project with many dimensions. I need to bring in more energy (people) to make it all happen. Apply within.

Wild Waldo and Valentine's Day

2010-02-14T15:45:00.000-08:00

Goats are said to become tame and go wild faster than any other creature. And since recent attempts to integrate them with Waldo, they have learned to return for corn whenever I turn up. I recently took in three feral kittens/young cats as mousers in the barn. Only one is still visible (the others MAY be hiding, or they may have been eaten). It is said they will never seek human contact, and one should not try. But this one black/grey little guy ... is slim, sleek, and desperately affectionate, curling his body around my legs. So, early today I set out flyers about Waldo-Lost Dog, including one at the church at the bottom of Sunny Slope road just before their morning sevice. A Miss Scott called from way back in the hollow on Hollis Creek Rd. She had him, and when I went round, he was on the road walking with yet another lady, who was surprised to learn I was his 'owner'. Two other dogs turned up, and there were various attempts at canine fornication (though I believe they were all boys). I took him home in the back of the truck, walked him up to the barn etc. He checked out his hut, found no food there, and set off into the distance round the lake. At the same time as my dear Waldo was going rogue and I was sitting on the rocks, the little barn cat was shedding his 'feral' label, enjoying being stroked and petted. On this Valentine's Day, I am thinking I have been sent a big lesson. You will lose what you don't keep stroking ... And you can conquer even a wild creature if you put it out there. But I am especially sad about Waldo, who I assume, has gone back to his new friends. I guess I blew it. Just then he came bounding up from behind the barn, having obviously made a very long circuit, probably peeing on every tree trunk. I gave him food in his hut, heard the scuttling of mice, the 'feral' kitten joined the party (and smelled the mice), Waldo chased the kitten, ate some food, and came back with me to the house, where he wouldn't come in, and where he was greeted with hissing from Berzerker, asleep on the recliner on the porch. I gave him more food. He hung out on the porch, ate the food while I combed him out, then after barking at ?? (a deer?) he disappeared. It's not so much a dog-eat-dog world as one in which tastes and affections, and food are unpredictably distributed. But if you want to keep it, stroke it.

We don't rent pigs !?

2010-02-12T07:12:00.001-08:00

I think we need a little background here.

Scale Green Birdman

2010-02-07T21:15:00.000-08:00

I emailed David Kemp to see if he had an image of Scale Green Birdman (1982), a weird and wonderful tiny hut/look-out at Grizedale (UK). Something of the same uncanny tone would work well here. I wonder if he will reply.

Animelee

2010-02-07T21:04:00.000-08:00

Feeding corn outside the barn: the goats swarm down from the rocks, the two ducks scuttle up from the pond, and 'elbow' their way in, a mouse hops out of the grass nearby and scoots towards the barn, where the streaky black feral kitten does not notice because he is watching Waldo, who is really only trying to be friendly.

When I feed Waldo in his absence, the goats gobble up his biscuits in a trice. Do I have to buy him bones so they will leave his food alone? In the absence of food, he is wandering off, perhaps 'visiting'. In the snow, I thought he would be camouflaged, white on white. No way: he's not white at all, but dirty yellowed off-white.

Warm globally, freeze locally

2010-01-11T12:41:00.000-08:00

A duck froze to death last night. I should have fed them cracked corn more regularly. I thought they could still find insects, but perhaps they stay warm by staying in the water, which is now frozen over. Need to pay more attention.

Artists in residence at work

2010-01-11T12:15:00.000-08:00

Audrey and Daniel Lebel

A library and a garden

2010-01-11T11:40:00.000-08:00

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need" (Cicero)

Well, here is the garden, tucked in for the winter by Audrey, and with raised beds by Daniel, from wood recycled from the old house. The library is indoors. So what is the link between library and garden? Culture and horticulture: complementary resources. This garden, founded on composting and soil improvement, promotes the idea that a good gardener feeds the soil not the plant, a more generally applicable principle. In an earlier entry, I have defended the garden in relation to the wholly wild. Man can cultivate and enhance natural diversity, even as we can also trample it underfoot. Intervention is not always blind.

I must read Robert Pogue Harrison's Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. (He visited us many years ago in the wake of his Forests book.)

Here is some blurb for Gardens:

"Humans have long turned to gardens—both real and imaginary—for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh’s garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative, nourishing, necessary havens.

With Gardens, Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human condition. Moving from from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and losses of history. The ancients, explains Harrison, viewed gardens as both a model and a location for the laborious self-cultivation and self-improvement that are essential to serenity and enlightenment, an association that has continued throughout the ages. The Bible and Qur’an; Plato’s Academy and Epicurus’s Garden School; Zen rock and Islamic carpet gardens; Boccaccio, Rihaku, Capek, Cao Xueqin, Italo Calvino, Ariosto, Michel Tournier, and Hannah Arendt—all come into play as this work explores the ways in which the concept and reality of the garden has informed human thinking about mortality, order, and power.

Alive with the echoes and arguments of Western thought, Gardens is a fitting continuation of the intellectual journeys of Harrison’s earlier classics, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead. Voltaire famously urged us to cultivate our gardens; with this compelling volume, Robert Pogue Harrison reminds us of the nature of that responsibility—and its enduring importance to humanity."

Comments:

"I find myself completely besotted by a new book titled Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison. The author . . . is one of the very best cultural critics at work today. He is a man of deep learning, immense generosity of spirit, passionate curiosity and manifold rhetorical gifts."—Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune

"This book is about gardens as a metaphor for the human condition. . . . Harrison draws freely and with brilliance from 5,000 years of Western literature and criticism, including works on philosophy and garden history. . . . He is a careful as well as an inspiring scholar."—Tom Turner, Times Higher Education

"When I was a student, my Cambridge supervisor said, in the Olympian tone characteristic of his kind, that the only living literary critics for whom he would sell his shirt were William Empson and G. Wilson Knight. Having spent the subsequent 30 years in the febrile world of academic Lit. Crit. . . . I’m not sure that I’d sell my shirt for any living critic. But if there had to be one, it would unquestionably be Robert Pogue Harrison, whose study Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, published in 1992, has the true quality of literature, not of criticism—it stays with you, like an amiable ghost, long after you read it.

“Though more modest in scope, this new book is similarly destined to become a classic. It has two principal heroes: the ancient philosopher Epicurus . . . and the wonderfully witty Czech writer Karel Capek, apropos of whom it is remarked that, whereas most people believe gardening to be a subset of life, ‘gardeners, including Capek, understand that life is a subset of gardening.’”—Jonathan Bate, The Spectator

End of goat Guantanamo

2010-01-05T14:36:00.000-08:00

After ten days of sequestration at the barn, with Waldo, the goats are released. Some hesitated, the rest poured out. So, we're into animal management, training, instilling habits etc. 'Twas always thus. They are much tamer, they like hay and now hang around the barn more.

Saffron Gate

2010-01-03T09:34:00.001-08:00

In memory of
Jean-Claude
(1935-2009)
Photo Neko

Projected Framescapes

2010-01-03T09:31:00.000-08:00

Writer’s cabin site with surreal viewing windows.
Photo Neko.

Floating Gallery

2010-01-03T09:09:00.000-08:00

Natural objects find themselves unexpectedly surrounded by a gallery space.

Photo by Neko.

Great Leap Forward

2010-01-03T08:41:00.000-08:00

Finally Yellow Bird is taking off as a writers/artist’s retreat and sculpture park. I currently have two artists in residence, a barn ‘gallery’, and some new installations of my own. (See http://sites.google.com/site/yellowbirdonline/about-my-art/new-installations). And with the help of the Lebel family - Daniel, Audrey, Neko and Luca, wwoofers extraordinaire - the whole site is being repaired, restored and generally made ship-shape, especially the orchard, the barn and the garden. I have identified the sites for three cosy cabins, the first one using the rough-hewn 9’ x 15’cedar frame of an existing shed (called the ‘garage’ because of its pre-1964 use), with an unusual bowed roof. And we are recycling wood from the demolished house, and standing dead trees in the woods, into stacks of fuel for the new woodstove.

The last few weeks we have spent creating things and mending them. The first makes afresh, the second works with a shape already given. Each has its own particular satisfaction. The first explores the unknown, brings into being. The second traces the contours of the given, with a view to restoring, even improving it. We repaired a cheap bench once imported as a kit from China, relaunching it with recycled heart of pine slats that will last indefinitely. It was easy to imagine, with Plato, that it now more closely participates in the ideal form of the bench.

When you get into the groove of mending things, it is astonishing how many of the things we live with need our help, and how we shield ourselves from noticing this. This phenomenon is ‘writ large’ when you inherit a dilapidated farm, but I suspect it is generally true. We dream of getting ahead of the game, but is that really possible? And if we include unfinished plans and projects, the fractal nature of incompleteness is surely incontestable. I have about five books currently on the go: suppose I completed all of them – what would the writing landscape look like then? My guess is that there would be another five germinating in the compost bin of the brain. But what follows from this is not that there is no point in finishing these books (because the category of the unfinished will be replenished), but that I (at least) need to convert that frustration into the creative tension of an active ongoing process.

There have been set-backs. The truck spreading gravel on the connecting road got stuck in the deep mud. So too did the wrecker sent to rescue it. Finally an old army truck with winches etc. pulled the other two out. (See image.) The whole convoy only pulled out long after dark. And the jury is still out on Waldo, the new goat dog. Buddy disappeared in October, and I was assured that two year-old Waldo, a Great Pyrenees, had been raised with goats. A real goat dog runs with the goats protecting them day and night. Waldo however likes human company. A final 10 day goat-sequestration experiment will decide which way he will go.Newsflash: yesterday two new kids were born into freezing weather, dying hours later. Their mother licked them, but I think she knew they were doomed. 150 days after the pleasures of August, who would have known where it would lead. I bought straw bales to provide a nest, but … I am told heat lamps might have saved them.

All the mending, clearing and re-arranging sets the scene for the next phase, of art and intellectual creativity, residencies etc. With Rohan Quinby’s help, we launched the YB series of workshops/seminars Thinking Without Boundaries with Time and the Image in November, and then in December we had an inaugural exhibition at Wild Goat Gallery, with Daniel and Audrey Lebel, Paul Littlehales, Joel Beaupre, and William Kooienga.
Plus two of my own installations, and a new Floating Gallery. [See next blog]

Non-profit status is being applied for, and Margaret Pearson’s generous support is continuing.

This morning (Sunday) I helped Luca measure up rafters for his tree-house, keeping watch over the Peace Circle. We saw a red fox, a flock of plump iridescent blue turkeys, white-tailed deer high-tailing it through the woods, and we released Waldo from his captivity with the goats for a spot of galavanting on the newly frozen lake.

Life goes on.

From our solstice party!

2009-12-21T07:01:00.000-08:00

Waldo

2009-10-24T07:40:00.000-07:00

I understand how mothers set the table for their sons missing in action - for years. Its not just to keep hope alive, but to make sure one is NOT doing something that the cosmos would take as a sign that he could now die. The 'sighting' of Buddy was a tugging of the heart-strings, but I think, an illusion born of wanting it to be true. So yesterday I took delivery of Walker, a two year old Great Pyrenees. He came in a wire kennel, covered in canvas on the back of a pick-up. He has more or less lived with goats on a farm all his life, but probably in a pen. Yesterday and today I have unsuccessfully tried to introduce him to the goats, but they always run off when he approaches, and he gives up. I will soon be very fit, hunting for goats at the far ends of the property, chasing up and down hills. They keep melting away, keeping quiet. I am going to get bells for the leaders - if I can ever catch them. (I remember those cow bells in Austria.) Meanwhile, a problem. I can't leave the dog alone and loose - he might well just follow me home, or run away. So I have to shut him in the barn, which doesn't help with the goat bonding. I got lots of feedback on Facebook about a new name. Walker won't do. I am experimenting with Waldo (from JP). Worried it might get shortened to Wally.

K9 resurrection?

2009-10-09T09:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Bob announced that Buddy had been seen somewhere along Sunny Slope Rd, clipped of his long coat. Or a dog just like Buddy. Today I posted mail boxes along the road. Could it really be, that Buddy could return from the dead, after a commemorative ceremony? Missing PRESUMED dead! And just after I had lost the phone # for the people with the Great Pyrenees, that I would have picked up on Thursday, to replace him. Watch this space.

Feast of the Hunters Moon

2009-10-05T16:38:00.000-07:00

A small but select gathering. Perhaps what brought on the rain was the announcement that we would play cricket. Rain is then traditional. But we did mass with umbrellas to commemorate the life of Buddy, a dear friend and protector of the bush goats. We planted a black walnut - the most valuable hard wood - near where the old house once was. And beneath the tree, we stuffed farewell notes. John Llewelyn, dog-lover extraordinaire, who had met Buddy, wrote: "Thank you for your continuing joyful presence in the thoughts of your master and of all those others of us lucky enough to have known you." We checked on the ducks - still swimming as a single flotilla. And we danced to Fleetwood Mac, and Eric Clapton. When people drifted home late it was still raining.

Like a duck to water

2009-10-03T18:04:00.000-07:00

For Beth, ducks had become old news. Of the five left after Jesse died last week, many did not even have a name. There was Artemis, and then ... It was time they left. After we perfected the art of corralling and swooping with a big net, they were soon each inside a cardboard box, and being trucked off to YB. I lined up the boxes at the water's edge, opened the flaps, and Christina shot some pictures of ducks Celebrating Freedom, shooting off across the water, with big smiles on their beaks. This morning they were still sailing around the pond, in convoy, this time with grins. They are rising up to flash their wings, splash-washing in the water, and dipping for worms. They cannot believe their luck. But then they have not yet seen (or heard of) coyotes. I hope they start frequenting the Duck Hotel moored in the middle of the pond - the Blue Zone. I used to worry about them being snatched by snapping turtles, but I was assured that these would only take young ducklings. Then today I saw the shell of a monster turtle over 15 ins long, that had fallen into a sinkhole and died. If there are more like that... I also saw a long black water snake. And Kelly said that when he lifted the straw bale out of the water, lots of orange snakes swam off. Later this was modified to brown. What do we have in the water?

Reclaiming the barn

2009-09-28T15:52:00.000-07:00

Jay cleaned out the top floor of the red barn last week, making its lines sharper and the possibilities for 'remodeling' more visible. It is a cavernous space, some 40' square, on three different levels. The large central area could be used as a dance floor if the rough oak boards were sanded or covered. And a few steps down, there is a potential bunkhouse, about 40' x 10'. The pigeons that were roosting in the roof seem to have moved out, which is good news. Their guano line down the middle of the floor started eating into the wood. I now imagine that central space as a gallery cum seminar room, at least in clement weather. Currently it's open to the elements in various degrees, with the large loading bay in the front, and gaps between the vertical oak siding on the other walls. In the summer the gentle breeze keeps everything cool. The dutch barn design was ideal for loose hay. Now, as a barn it's obsolete. But as an architectural structure, it's pretty impressive.

But there is one problem. It still smells of goat. A little while back I fenced off most of the ground floor where they had enjoyed a free run. Today I raided unused fence-lines for 12' stock fencing, and sealed off their last gathering place. They still have the bull pen and the chicken coop for shelter. But now the barn can begin to sweeten up. One day I will clear out all the straw inside, and re-imagine the whole building. Then the dust would begin to recede too.

Welcoming the Other

2009-09-26T06:19:00.001-07:00

I carefully planted hops and a grape vine to climb up poles from the earth onto the trellis covering the elevated front deck. The grape started climbing and then got stripped by caterpillars. One of the hops has reached about 10' and slowed down as if awaiting instructions. But something I did not plant has really taken off. It is coiling on the deck planning its takeover. Extensive googling turned up the name Cyprus Vine, and it is loved and hated because of its vigor. It has the softest fern-like leaves, and bright red five-pointed star flowers in profusion.

For Derrida true hospitality (if there is such a thing) happens when you even welcome the stranger who may destroy your house. Welcome Cyprus Vine! But I think I will keep a watch on it.

Crows 'n corn

2009-09-11T11:18:00.001-07:00

The garden was a modest success this first year. Drought was a problem in the absence of a watering system. And open sowing faced huge challenges from local 'weeds', i.e. the plants already there. I never had time to hoe, nor the material for loose mulching. Everywhere I used landscape fabric things worked quite well. But the soil still needs improving. And only a few giant sunflowers actually made it. Zinnias were a great success - sown in the cracks of soil after weedfabric was taken up. Lots of cut flowers. Amazing basil. Lotsa squashes.

The final challenge came from four crows who descended like umbrellas with teeth on my few corn plants. And then the heirloom tomatoes. I never realised quite what a formidable problem they must be for farmers. I thought of scarecrows, but wondered whether wily crows would be deceived for long. Cheekwood has an exhibition right now. http://www.cheekwood.org/Gardens/Scarecrows.aspx

And here is Van Gogh.

The force of beauty

2009-08-20T08:59:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wake up and see the folly - not of all man's works but of mine. Yellow Bird is a fantasy that I cannot possibly realize, too off the beaten track, too hot in the summer, too much for one person etc etc. Jay has been bushhogging with my tractor recently, and doing quite a bit. But the weeds seem to be winning. And progress on building projects is next to zero. I say to myself that I am waiting for the pound to recover from its precipitous decline last year. So this morning I took a tour on the four wheeler to see what I could still get Tony Young to cut professionally with his 10' wide bushhog. And I glimpsed again the envisioned YB, the rolling grass, the place that could feed the dreams of others too. And with that vision back in place, everything changed. The YB dream is back on track. So what is happening here?
One sociobiological explanation of the appeal of landscape painting, and look-out points etc. is that when we were apes, we would climb trees both for safety from predators, and to get a better view of possible threats. Landscape vision represents security. There may be SOMETHING in this. Views of dense forests, or jungles seem less attractive, and that might be because we cannot see what might be hiding in there. Desertscapes, on the other hand, are attractive only when there are interesting dune formations, or wave patterns in the sand, or oases. And even then, there seems to be something lacking? This suggests that security is not enough. Yellow Bird grabbed me because there was a perfect mix of meadows and woods, cleared and dark spaces.If artistic values sublimate naturalistic ones, then one would expect analogs of the concern for both security and interest to re-appear. Total clarity would offer real control, but over nothing. At the naturalistic level, a landscape with no dark spaces would hide no predators, but also provide no cover for edible creatures (or plants). If sublimation moves us from considerations of diet and survival to ones of information - richness of input combined with a capacity for forming and shaping - would that account for landscape values? And for changes in our 'views' of landscape? (Think of the glories of wilderness, on the one hand, and the gardens of Versailles, on the other.) Somewhere in the middle, towards Versailles perhaps, Jencks' Garden of Cosmic Speculation. It would be an interesting theme for a YB photoshoot - the tame and the wild, and the battle/creative tension between them.

Commemorating Buddy - from John Llewelyn

2009-08-16T14:54:00.000-07:00

Dear David,
I have just been walking in the gardens of Astley-Ainslie hospital along the end of our road. At the edge of one of the lawns, under a tree, are gravestones commemorating dogs that have, presumably, "belonged to" certain members of staff-though the one remembering Sambo makes me wonder whether Harry and Barbara Acton, who lived not far away, had their Welsh spaniel interred there. The earliest date is on the grave of Dum-Dum, who died on August 25 1900. The most recent date is on the grave of Pax, who died on July 27 2008. The stone is new and was probably put in position a few weeks ago on the anniversary of his or her death. I also walked today along the "donkey track" on Blackford Hill where someone has fixed to a section of exposed igneous rock a wee brass plate on which is written:

"In loving memory of Rex & Moss
& Polly & Cleo,
Fower dugs tae whom
This hill belanged a'
The days o' thir lives."

In the garden and on the hill I thought of the dogs named at these two sacred places, but I also thought of Buddy. And I thought of him too when I was back home in our own garden where the horse-chestnut leaves will soon be falling on the grave of our German Shepherd Dog Jacky. Margaret and I were granted the gift of burying him. If you are denied that with Buddy, you must invent something that will not only help you, as Margaret was helped by writing a book about our life with Jacky, the last chapter of which is also the last chapter of my attachment (blessed word). We are sending an extra donation to Compassion in World Farming in support of the campaign to ensure that male dairy calves have a life worth living. We are doing it in memory of Buddy. You, David, through your writings and other actions on behalf of
animals, have already put into practice Gavin Maxwell's maxim "Whatever joy she gave to you, give back to nature." But if you thought of a way of commemorating and celebrating the life of Buddy in particular (like planting a special tree?), your friends and his over there and over here would be grateful for the opportunity to contribute to whatever that might cost.

But I refuse to give up all hope yet that he will find his way back home. Meanwhile, for sending those lovely photographs of him and for him and his "owner" we are

Yours gratefully,

John and Margaret

In memoriam Buddy boy

2009-08-12T15:35:00.000-07:00

Before I left for England and Italy, I gave Buddy some worming liquid and a big hug. Two weeks later, Joe drove up to the house to say he had not seen Buddy for three days. He was about 10 years old. His mother had died at about 8. When I counted the goats they were down to 10, and I thought Buddy might have died in a valiant battle against coyotes. On recounting the goats there were 14, so no losses. If anything an extra one. I cannot find him, or his body. But there is a bad smell near his shed which I cannot pin down in the long grass. Could I have killed him with the worming liquid? It was just routine - I never saw worms. But he had not had it before. Was he just old? Did he have heartworm? I wish I had been here to help. Could I, or a vet, have made a difference? According to Joe, he just stopped showing up. Was he injured?Buddy had the perennial smile of a sheepdog, which comes from the line of the mouth. It's hard not to respond with trust and affection, which generates more trust. I had often imagined truly befriending him, taking him back to the house one day. I worried it would ruin his connection to the goats. I always thought there was more time. As with so many things, that's not true. Perhaps it's better to say: there never more time. There are only actions, events, decisions. But that's not true either.
Today I was up with the goats. Lots of serious braying - male/male standoffs - with huge horns. Some residual coyote protection from these guys. Goodbye Buddy. I want to find your body, for closure. And then again, dear friend, I don't.

Small writer's cabins: A COMPETITION [follow up from January]

2009-05-22T19:55:00.000-07:00

Here are some images from the web.

I am in discussion with T.K.Davis (Nashville/UT Knoxville) about a Writers Cabin competition: building small retreats will be an immediate way of attracting to YB some creative people.

To expand a little.

1. Specifications
Imagine a single room, 8x10' with built in desk. Could be some reference to Michael Pollan, Heidegger's hut, other famous writing places (see January blog).Must be able to be built off site, and set onto blocks on site. Ideally I would like to specify some heating and cooling standard, such as solar fan, so well insulated it hardly needs heating, and solar powered lighting/electricity. But I do not want to totally stifle other forms of creativity. We do need to say something about what we are looking for. Originality, playfulness, eco-friendly, pleasure-to-work-in. I am interested in conceptual integrity/style/innovation etc. But trumping all such considerations these must be places/spaces that can themselves inspire focus and creativity in those using them - writers, songwriters, academics - an interesting challenge for a designer. Total insulation is great, but not in itself inspiring. And there are some fascinating looking spaces that would be very distracting to work in. Option to visit YB and check out possible sites.

TK says that UT Knoxville's architecture department has an inside 'construction platform' on which such a cabin could be built. This reinforces a certain intensification of the challenge being posed here: Given these parameters [8' x 10', plus x,y,z...] what is your IDEAL writing space? Constraints function like sonnet form in poetry - opening up creative freedom.

2. Stages/dates
I would LIKE to start now - give people the summer to make something. We need first to solicit some reasonably detailed designs (incl. materials budget) so we could select half a dozen (!!!) and give the budget to go ahead and actually build. (What budget would be reasonable?) I am hoping the terms of the competition could involve YB keeping the end products, while offering the builders/designers some numbers of free weeks accommodation in their own (or other people's) cabins over the coming years, and website exhibition. Installation sometime in the Fall. There could be various categories of winner: most green, most creative, cheapest!. All would be featured with pics etc on the website, offering a showcase/virtual gallery for the final product, ideally one which one could walk around.

3. Entrants/Publicity
In principle anyone could enter- architecture/design students, architects (& green builders) in Nashville/Knoxville and elsewhere - but practically they would need to be within reasonable trucking distance (on a standard 6x12’ trailer). Could publicity be done via email lists?

Interdependence Crunch Time

2009-05-14T08:29:00.000-07:00

Chris left Tuesday, and (as a goodbye gift?), Berzerker presented us with a decapitated finch on the back doormat. What is the proper response to such a gift? I left it there until this morning when I shook the whole mat, feathers, corpse and all into nearby bushes, hoping I had measured gratitude appropriately. The mat was clean again. One hour later, in the same place, there is a chipmunk, seemingly sleeping. What to do? Can Berzerker and I ever really communicate? I like the IDEA of gifts, but ... And what is the sub-text? Is he complaining about the cat biscuits (not REAL food - THIS is real food!!). Or is he saying, "I don't actually NEED yr cat biscuits - don't insult me - look what I can find on my own!". Or, "Hey - just something I caught on the fly." Or "See. I'm keeping the place vermin-free, as per contract." So how long do I leave the chipmunk on the mat? If I leave it there, might it suggest I haven't seen/appreciated it? If I remove it, where to put it? In the bin, in far away bushes? Should Berzerker be able to work out what happened to it? If I move it too quickly, will B feel the need to replace it ASAP. What would each of these options mean to him? Help.

***

Update. Tamias Striatus was being visited by flies. This trumps all consideration of cat/man etiquette. I threw it far into the woods. In the course of doing this a whole new and deeply disconcerting dimension opened up. Mr. Chipmunk was already exhibiting rigor mortis. This suggests that he had not been killed immediately before being placed on the mat, but sometime before, and the BODY HAD BEEN MOVED. Could Mr. B have been waiting for me to move the finch before replacing it with the chipmunk. Could he have a store of such carcasses lined up under the porch? "Your move Woody!" What game is he playing? Help!!

Declaration of Interdependence

2009-05-09T08:29:00.000-07:00

"Eleven score and eleven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that, in their elevation above Nature, and their struggle to master it, all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that proposition, or any such project, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a monument to those creatures who here and across the globe have been sacrificed to this tragic cause.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow-this ground. Countless speechless creatures, indeed species beyond number, whose like we will not see again, have consecrated it with their blood, far above our poor power to add or detract. The earth will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it must never forget the tragedy and the suffering to which we here bear witness. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to healing the harm that our predecessors, with the best will in the world, so confidently advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave their lives - that we here highly resolve that these living beings, human and non-human, shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under Gaia, shall have a new, more embracing, more generous birth of freedom, and that the earth shall not perish by a myopic government of the human, by the human, for the human." [DCW/2008]

Aeolian art

2009-05-07T07:20:00.000-07:00

I am dreaming of:

1. An acoustic version of a Chris Drury cloud chamber. I found a Canadian guy, Greg Joly (www.harmonicwindharps.com) who makes harmonic sanctuaries - similar idea. It could actually overlay the camera obscura effect with integrated sound resonance. Could this be done without electronics by passing the light through water/oil that was being vibrated with sound? Extracts from Joly's wind harp CD @ http://www.harmonicwindharps.com/cd.htm

2. An acoustic dimension (with drilled holes) to my solar spiral sculpture piece, a cross between Spiral Jetty and Lightning Field, being planned for New Mexico. The drilled tubes would 'echo' Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels!

For an example of these sounds, check out
http://www.bamboo-craft.com/forums/showthread.php?t=446

There is a new sculpture based on these principles near Burnley in UK : Burnley's Panopticon, Singing Ringing Tree, in a stunning windswept location on Crown Point, designed by Mike Tonkin and Anna Liu

And I have discovered a wonderful wind artist in Holland, Robert Valkenburgh, one of whose works is imaged above. "The instrument ... has twelve bamboo organ pipes, 3mtr. long, with altogether 127 sound holes, positioned in a spiral around the tubes, so that no matter the direction of the wind, there are always a few notes to be heard." His website is http://www.windgallery.nl/index.html

Walking in the other man's shoes

2009-05-05T17:25:00.000-07:00

I do not need to grow my own food to eat well. But if you try, you learn something. (And you can eat better!) After hours struggling with clay dirt, and intermittent heavy rain, trying to hold back weeds in favor of the squash, melon, corn, and tomatoes that we favor, snatching lunch and keeping working, so much becomes a whole lot clearer. I find myself sympathizing more than ever with the poor whites photographed during the dust bowl, and depression - gaunt, tired, anxious, and unkempt, often standing outside their wooden shacks, like like Steinbeck's Tom Joad whose family (in Grapes of Wrath) had to leave their farm and travel across country to find work. I made a whole series of choices - how deep to plant, whether or not to wait until the soil was drier etc etc. If I was wrong, I would have wasted some time, but I would not starve. But imagine depending on your crops actually succeeding. There is something to Hegel's sense that the slave has something over the master, perhaps an unmediated relation to nature. But if I were working for someone else, revolution would only be held at bay by fatigue. As things stand, while my capacity to walk a little bit in the other guy's shoes has been enhanced, I know I am cheating the real. But I am getting a REAL work-out, up and down, lifting, hauling, digging etc. so unlike the meaningless muscle exercises in the gym. And I am seeding the chance of some incredible, rare, not-in-the stores heritage vegetables for later in the summer. But WHO am I when I make this garden? I thought of Tom Joad, but only when the dirt was getting under my nails. Mostly I thought of my mother and her plant stand, and above all her father, Frank, who was a market gardener, and who grew the best tomatoes. Interestingly however, he was not a romantic. He grew Moneymaker because they were a reliable cropper. Whereas I am growing yellow, beefsteak, Kellog's Breakfast, and many many more varieties I have never heard of. For the taste and the look.

Google Earth meets Yellow Bird

2009-05-05T13:17:00.000-07:00

See http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=35.802943,-86.087753&z=14&t=h&hl=en

From Barn to Gallery: Stage One

2009-05-05T10:23:00.000-07:00

I just ruined the day for 13 goats, by evicting them from the barn they have come to call home. A 16' section of heavy duty stock fence now seals off their entrance. I tried to explain to Buddy what was happening, and he accompanied me to the bull pen behind the barn, and the old chicken coop which I opened up. I only hope he got the message, and can guide the goats into their new 'suggested' quarters. Next step - evict the pigeons. Dung, guano - it all has to go in the name of art!

But then I had two disturbing thoughts:

(1) That I am turning back art history in a big way. Surely dung is IN!! Look at this: "Painter Chris Ofili won England's 20,000-pound Turner Prize in 1998 for some paintings spruced up with elephant dung from the London Zoo. [...]Other folks aren't taking Ofili-style art so well either. In December 1998, Reuters reported that Ray Hutchins, a "professional illustrator, has shown the British art world what he thinks of the dried elephant dung-wielding painter who won Britain's top art prize," the aforementioned Turner Prize captured by Ofili. How did he show the world? The 66-year-old man dumped a wheelbarrow full of bovine scat on the steps of London's Tate Gallery, where Ofili was then displaying his award-winning "art." "

(2) Only yesterday I was sketching a five year plan for YB, in which each year would be dedicated to one sense. Smell will need some serious thought. Flowers, yes. And then I was thinking - goats! But now I seem to be into smell reduction!! Am I just a hypocrite? No the goat smell will be there, just in a different place.

Green Light Church

2009-05-05T09:47:00.000-07:00

There are various ways forward in registering as a Non Profit Organization. It turns out that becoming a church is the least complicated path, if one could swallow it! The IRS is apparently pretty reluctant to question what kind of religion you profess, and it seems worshipping nature is just fine. I guess this springs from the First Amendment respecting Freedom of Religion. Trouble is it would really put off some of my friends, and, I expect, some potential donors. Nonetheless I did discover that one favorite name - the Green Light Church - is available as a .org website, which is (to me at least) astonishing. Green light has three crazily overlapping senses: (1) An eco church (cf. green fingers); (2) Aldo Leopold's reference to the green fire fading in the eyes of an old wolf he had just shot; (3) The green light in the sense of "the church that likes to say YES". But I think we would have to have regular worship sessions. Would collective gardening count?

Yorkshire Sculpture Park comes to Yellow Bird

2009-04-28T06:11:00.000-07:00

Some of those who gathered at YB on Sunday to chat with Peter Murray about Art in the Landscape. Guests included: T.K.Davis (Civic Design Center, Nashville @ Architecture, UT Knoxville), Hanjörg and Gisella Goritz (Architecture, UT Knoxville), Michael Baggarly (Sculpture, MTSU), Mark Scala (Frist), Joseph Mella (VU Fine Arts Gallery), Jochen Wierich (Cheekwood), Gregg Horowitz (VU, Philosophy), Jonathan Neufeld (VU, Philosophy), Joe Prince (Woodbury), Christine Haase (German Studies, UGA). Stephen Tepper (VU Curb Center) and Mel Zeigler (VU Art Department) caught up with Peter Murray at his public talk at the Frist on the Monday.

A year ago when I bought The Lodge, I knew it could function as a reception center, and all-weather space of welcome. And so it proved on Sunday when some 15 quests truned out to talk with Peter Murray about his Yorkshire Scilpture Park, and about public art more generally.Peter and Christine had arrived at lunch, having driven from Atlanta the previous day, spending the night in Chattanooga. T.K.Davis drove down from Knoxville, as well as Hansjörg and Gisella Goritz in their white 1972 Porsche. The weather was perfect. We walked the main tracks - Jay had bush-hogged them the previous day - though I was painfully aware how little of the estate people got to see. You can take a quick walk around in about an hour, but with all the trails now open, and bit of lingering here and there, the complete circuit would take 3-4 hours easily. The full experience would include the Peace Circle, the bamboo groves, the mossy rocks, Tree House Ridge, the South Field, the watercress waterfall, Look Out Ridge, the cedar field, the Kiss, and Spring Hollow.

We set up our 'seminar table' on the deck, and a slow fan, though it was only late April! After a while, Mark Scala, getting us down to business, asked me how I conceived of YB sculpture park, and I presented the big picture - cabins for writers and artists, summer residencies for sculptors, an annual 6 week fall show, and educational sessions for kids. There was general admiration for the barn, and enthusiasm for converting it into a gallery space. Clearly too the sauna must be finished, as that will be quite a draw, both for the sheer pleasure, and for its cobby architectural interest. TK pressed the idea of a competition to design and build 8x8 cabins to encourage student and underemployed local architects to come up with innovative designs. These could be built offsite, then hauled in on a trailer. Peter Murray was insistent on not acquiring permanent work one might regret. YSP does lots of temporary exhbitions; this looks like the way to go - perhaps keeping good pieces for a year.

It is easy to think of wood and stone as the obviously available local material, guiding the kind of art that will happen here. But as soon as one begins to think 'conceptually' things really open up. This place, as with many others, is layered with time and history (incl. geological) in so many ways that could be celebrated or explored artistically, with or without limiting oneself to local materials (we have a 'local' scrap yard).

Applying for 501(c)3 (nonprofit) status will help move us forward. All agreed on the next stage - defining the specific focus of YB, and putting in place the ingredients that will 'let it happen' - cabin, barn-gallery, and funding. Institutional ties (formal and informal) to Nashville Metro Arts (?), to Cannon County Arts Center, to Cheekwood, to Vanderbilt (Fine Arts Gallery, Art Department), to MTSU, and to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park will all help.

More on the rabbit trickster

2009-04-19T08:40:00.000-07:00

[lifted from http://paganismwicca]

Western European Symbolism
Rabbit (Coinean) and Hare (Gèarr) are symbols of fertility, intuition, rebirth, promise, fulfillment, and balance. He is the Goddess’ creature and represents the Moon, night and dawn. is also associated with abundance, rebirth and release and is symbolic of the ‘tween times, dawn and dusk. Their motions were used for divination. They’re also associated with transformation, receiving esoteric knowledge and intuitive messages.

The Celts believed they brought luck and keeping a part of the animal, usually the foot, attracted good fortune. It was also believed that the foot protected people against evil. Rabbit is a symbol of Easter and Ostara.

Native American
Rabbit, like Coyote, Raven and Crow, is considered trickster by some Native American tribes. Nanabozho or Manabozho, Great Hare, is a powerful figure found in some stories. Nanabozho is a hero, creator of the earth, supporter of humans, bringer of fire and light, and teacher of the sacred rituals. In others he’s a clown, a thief, or a sly predator, an amoral animal dancing on the boundary between the positive and negative.

To some tribes he’s known as Fear Caller because he brings whatever he fears most to himself. He’ll see Coyote and will tell him to stay away because he’s afraid of him. When Coyote doesn’t hear, Rabbit calls louder and louder until coyote notices, then preys on him.

Other Cultures’ Folklore
* Western African American: Perhaps the best known is Br’er Rabbit, recorded by Joel Chandler Harris, narrated by fictional Uncle Remus. The slaves mixed their rabbit tales with those of local Native American tribes. Br’er got himself into all sorts of problems, but, being clever, he could talk his way of his troubles.
* West Africa: Many tribes, have lore about a Hare trickster who is equally rascal, clown, and hero. In one, Moon sends Hare, her messenger, to earth to give humans the gift of immortality. Hare gets things mixed up, giving them mortality instead.
* Cajuns: Had a trickster rabbit, Compare Lapin, who was akin to Br’er Rabbit.
* India: The Panchatantra fables portray Hare as a clever trickster whose adversaries were Elephant and Lion.
* Tibet: Trickster Hare outsmarts Tiger.
* Japan: Hare is sly, clownish, and mischievous.
* Chinese: A rabbit's foot is associated with prosperity, hope, fertility, abundance and good weather.

But while as a child I sided with Peter Rabbit, now I am increasingly sympathetic to the position of Mr McGregor.

Flying rabbits

2009-04-19T07:53:00.000-07:00

I have almost completed the 7' deer fence around the garden. Today I looked out the window and saw three horses, five deer and one turkey grazing the big pasture, just the other side of the new fence. I think I can keep the deer out. But I had not thought about turkeys. And then there are rabbits. The top part of the fence is 2" mesh, but the main sturdy lower part is about 6". This should keep out the flying rabbits, but the traditional ground loving sort will saunter through. Can I really bring myself to hope that Berzerker will take them out as baby bunnies for breakfast? Can I spray coyote urine around the perimeter? Does the Coop sell coyote urine? Do I really want to resort to trickery and deception to keep out unwanted critters? Kant says we should not beat a dog because it would hurt its owner, or perhaps corrupt an onlooker. We might be encouraging a cruelty that might later be inflicted on humans. Could not the same be said of trickery? Indeed there are ads for pheromones that would make one irresistible to the opposite sex. Isn't that on a continuum with coyote urine? And is not perfume already playing this game? So what is the difference between allurement and deception? Is it like white lies and lies of a darker shade? And what IS a white lie - is it an untruth told in one's own interest? Or one that is insignificant? Is it better to deceive rabbits, or to use a narrow mesh fence buried in the ground? And all of this leaves aside the question of whether I should not be sharing my crop with Peter Rabbit, or Bambi, or any of the other wild creatures. Why is this not an occasion for Derrida's infinite hospitality? I suspect that sadly there is a small truth hidden inside contractarianism - that some sort of agreed reciprocity is possible with humans, but not with the other-than-human, and that this sets important frameworks for exchange. Infinite hospitality would prescribe generosity to the point of bankruptcy and the subsequent inability to be generous. 'Good fences make good neighbors' may all be about maintaining the conditions for generosity! In the case of my garden, while access to it might give local critters dietary variation, it would give them a lot less satisfaction than it would cause me suffering. Would they really enjoy the Amish heirloominess of those tomatoes?

Addendum. With all this talk of tricking rabbits by spraying coyote-pee, I had entirely forgotten how intimately rabbits are already associated (LIKE COYOTES!!!) with trickery (and probably fences are important too). For example, there is a book *Tio Conejo (Uncle Rabbit) and Other Latin American Trickster Tales*, by Olga Loya. Here is the blurb:
"In folktales, the trickster can be the wise one or the fool, the one who fools or the one who is fooled. That is why children of all ages enjoy hearing these tales. The psychology of childhood is pretty much the same everywhere, giving these enjoyable stories universal appeal. In these four tales, told in Spanish and English, the trickster takes animal form: a monkey, an opossum, a dog, and a rabbit."

No Hunting! One Exception

2009-04-18T21:17:00.000-07:00

Easter egg hunt: making memories

Sartre once said that there are no real adventures, that adventures are ways in which we (re)construct the past.* That’s a bit of an exaggeration. I have two memories of easter egg hunts – one at a vicarage garden party when I was a child, and the other as a grown-up on an estate in Scotland. I remember them both, but especially the first, as events, as adventures. They were exciting social events, with people swirling around, but they were also solitary quests, trying to anticipate what someone else would think a good hiding place, as experienced burglars do with house keys concealed in the garden.

The weather could not have been better. After deadly tornadoes nearby the previous weekend, and heavy rain, the skies cleared for us, and we had a bright sunny day. I had devised a combo egg scavenger hunt and treasure trail. The scavenger hunt would be for kids, and not stray too far from the house. There would be chocolate eggs, and plastic eggs filled with candy. And the treasure hunt would send teams of people two in two directions around a figure of eight trail, crossing in the airstream trailer in the middle with a bottle of wine and glasses laid out on the table. There would also be a shorter trail for late-comers, leading to a buried pot of gold. In all cases there were a series of clues (39 in all), and gifts scattered around the clue sites, in crevices in trees, handing from branches, loosely covered on the ground etc. But as Robbie Burns told us, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.” I should not have told people in advance that they might meet in the Airstream because when they got lost, they headed there, generating something like a short-circuit, even carrying away the wine as a prize. And I had not anticipated that it would only be necessary for one team to row out to the floating Picasso-like yellow swan on the lake and read the clue. Others could simply tag along with those who had returned to shore. Of course the obsessive trail-designer wants people to follow each and every segment of the trail in the right order. So I was grateful to Zach for finding the pot of gold in the gulch at the very end. It was with mixed feelings that next day I discovered still lodged in a cedar tree a bottle of champagne, a small bottle of Chateau Yellow Bird Cabernet Sauvignon, 2010 (“Bottled in the imagination”). I had won my very own prize, like a dog who discovers in the Spring a bone he had forgotten he had buried in the Fall. The next treasure hunt will be slightly different, based on the potluck principle, and the public cashing in of coupons hidden on the trail for (hopefully seriously interesting) items brought by the participants.

The pot-luck part of this event was the food. Somehow, and without planning, there was exactly the right amount, and balance. And it was delicious.

Easter is a time of resurrection. And it seems the ticks got resurrected too after a winter of inactivity. It is said that the best way of ridding a pond of leeches is to invite a class of young kids to swim in the pond, and they will walk away as leech-magnets. I did not intend such a strategy in this case, but I understand that many ticks did get a ride home with my 30 guests. We should have sprayed, but the ticks had successfully staged a surprise spring offensive. Catherine found six, and was still counting. Luckily they are more creepy than dangerous.

* (Re: Sartre, above) It’s true we may not know until later how things will turn out, and sometimes do not label as such what we will subsequently call an adventure, but uncertainty about how things will turn out is a lived experience.

Why I like Leonardo

2009-03-15T16:57:00.000-07:00

What was renaissance man? A polymath perhaps? In Leonardo's case, we could say: artist, engineer, even natural historian. He painted, sketched, constructed siege engines, and filled dead lizards with wax so he could see the shape of their internal organs. But what is the value of being a polymath? Is it just being good at many things in parallel? No, it is rather the cross-pollination that arises from the crossing-over of one's various talents. But this could just happen horizontally, as it were, between different intellectual interests. Just as important, I believe, is the vertical interplay between what we think of as the theoretical and the practical. This is especially true of writing and thinking, where images and metaphors play such a vital role in shaping our work. When we sensuously (and attentively) work the world we viscerally reach down into the well-springs of poesis. Today I found myself repairing a broken chair with glue, and about eight clamps, each exerting pressure from a different angle. The chair was of no great value, and yet I had had it for decades, and it had become something of a friend. I had been using it to get extra height cleaning the roof of the truck, and then inadvertently backed up on it, crushing a leg. Wanting to mend it was overdetermined. I wanted to undo my own folly. But I also wanted to make a damaged thing whole. I react this way to almost anything that can be fixed, and with my workshop in place, I can now easily repair many ordinary sized objects. There is something fascinating about 'the broken', as Heidegger noted about a broken hammer. When a tool breaks (but equally when a living being is hurt), its taken-for-granted functionality is interrupted, and becomes visible, perhaps for the first time. There is an ontological"Aha!" experience. You appreciate things anew. But I still wonder what this desire to make things whole is all about, whether it is an instinct we all have some of (a gestalt tendency), and how it connects with Freud's eros and thanatos. Is it broadly what Freud meant by eros? And how is it connected with the desire to destroy, to kill? I know it is not what Freud meant, but there is clearly a synergistic version of these twin impulses - in which the destructive impulse is in the service of the creative. We want to destroy what impedes creativity - negativity, blockages, bad karma. But what then is the end of creativity - is it (in the case of mending the chair) just restoration of a static whole? That would be profoundly conservative. Wholes that are worth having do something. A machine works again. A mended chair stops wobbling, enabling one to concentrate on other things. A watered plant grows. Sometimes the 'doing' may be symbolic - demonstrating that (in the case of my chair) that damage can be undone, that time is not always irreversible. A non-conservative commitment to restoration would be to restore potential, possibility, openings onto a future, not some fixed essence. A true conservative might respond: but of course, what else? When the glue has set, I wonder if I should paint the chair red. Or stripes. Must order a WWLD? tee-shirt.

* Speaking of symbolic connections, the second image above is of The Broken Chair, a sculpture by Daniel Berset, which stands in front of the Palais des Nations (Geneva) and symbolises the campaign for a mine-free world. A hybrid of the broken tool and the hurt creature.

Blogging a dead horse

2009-03-15T11:19:00.000-07:00

Henry died yesterday. Jay and Melissa had four horses here: Big Mama, Chance, and two white ones: Gracie and Henry. And now Henry is no more. He lay down in a rain puddle at the end of the pasture, and died. In the evening mist it was too late to deal with his body. We covered him with a blue tarp, and secured it against coyotes with wire pegs. There were lots of tears. Melissa had given him extra shots, vitamins, special food, and he had put on 50 pounds. Had we done enough? Could we not have done more? Measuring his girth, he weighed some 747 lb. With dirty, wet,straggled hair, and half-bared teeth, he looked very dead. The people they got him from late last summer said he was 17, maybe 20. But from his flattened teeth he was clearly much older - over 30. (Perhaps one should look a gift horse in the mouth!!) Had they lied to get rid of him? And if they had lied? Had Melissa not taken him, he would have had a quick bullet in the head and missed out on those good last months. Are we not all tempted, at times, especially as we get older but feel young, to lie about our age? Kant worried that the practice of truth-telling would break down. How is it that white lies do not destroy truth? The question now was what to do with the body. Priscilla told me a while back that the pit down near the bottom creek bed had once been used for dead animals. But after the downpour it was full of water; Henry would just float. I phoned Tom to see if he had a backhoe so we could make a hole, but he was out. I later checked on the web about horse disposal. Seems there are laws in some states about what one can do. Important to keep dead horses out of water courses, away from neighbors yards, and to avoid critters you don't want turning up. (Hey - I got to use the word 'critters' - not previously part of my vocabulary.) Last year, a tree of vultures greeted me on a dead-goat day. I would like to have exposed ol' Henry on the hillside. Those winged butchers would have stripped and carried him off in no time. Instead we strapped him to a sheet of plywood, and skidded him first with the 4x4, and then with the tractor, to the far end of the Peace Circle field, and covered him on the ground with cedar branches. The kids were not with us. Alexis (aged 8) had wept all night and she will want to visit the grave. Jay said they will take her to some other patch of disturbed ground. I don't want to lie to her, said Melissa, but ... (But Alexis would not want to see a half-rotten, worm-infested Henry?) Could an eight year old child understand ashes to ashes? Horse to worms? Don't those horribly graphic Roald Dahl children's books suggest kids delight in the gruesome? And is it really gruesome to think of nature's little helpers (worms, ants, bacteria, vultures, coyotes ...) welcoming Henry's substance back into the mix. The people who gave us Henry lied about his age to smooth things along, and now we will lie about his resting place. Nietzsche says we cannot take too much reality, and yet he wants to rub our nose in this truth. Sartre imagines a world of brutal honesty as a healthier place. Jay told sobbing Alexis that Henry was in a better place now. Should we say these things? Unlike animals, we say we understand the meaning of death, so why not come clean: Henry is history. While we were folding Henry onto his plywood gantry, Chance, Big Mama, and Gracie galloped over menacingly. Would they charge us? - they acted as if we were intruding on their grief-space. Instead, they kept back and watched us intently. And when we skidded Henry away from the field, they followed, as if part of the cortege. What were they thinking? Do horses have at least the whiff of the abyss? Do they perhaps at least catch the drift?

Winter Wonderland

2009-03-04T06:43:00.001-08:00

It did not last long,
but the effect was dazzling.
Don't miss the deer!

Avian reflections

2009-02-28T08:01:00.000-08:00

It is 6:25 am and getting light outside. There is a tapping on the window which opens my eyes. It is my friend the red cardinal - this time the RED cardinal, the boybird. Sometimes his more demure brown mate comes instead. There is a tall bush brushing up against the window on the outside. The cardinals do not nest there, but it offers a safe place to hang out, and they can often be found skittering among the leaves. The tapping stops, and I go back to sleep. As if playing snooze-button, the tapping begins again at 7am precisely, at another point on the window.

After my father died, my sister was sleeping in an upstairs room in the Lothersdale house. She was woken up by a black bird pecking at the window, 'trying to get in'. It's hard not to think of Hitchcock's adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's story 'The Birds', or of the folkloric associations of death and the raven. What was the bird really doing?

When my kids were small, I told them bedtime stories. At one point they shared bunk beds in a room in a Victorian house that had a blocked-off fireplace. With a small turn of the imagination, it looked like a tiny door, perhaps out of a Narnia story. I would tell M&C about the magical world that it opened onto; they were sceptical and yet entranced.

Lacan writes of a certain structural alienation that we each undergo as humans, the stage of psychological development he dubs the 'mirror stage'. As young children (6-18 months) we experience ourselves as an image in the mirror, and for the first time grasp ourselves as a whole. But the price for this integration is a certain alienation - we identify ourselves with an image.

It has been said that no other creature can do this. But this is increasingly disputed. "Animals that have passed the mirror test are all of the great apes (bonobos, chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, and humans), bottlenose dolphins, orcas, elephants, and European magpies. Initially, it was thought that gorillas do not pass the test, but there are now several well-documented reports (such as one gorilla, Koko) of gorillas passing the test. In 1981, Epstein, Lanza and Skinner published a paper in the journal Science in which they argued that the pigeon also passes the mirror test. Pigeons though could only detect the spots on their own body after they had been trained to and untrained pigeons have never been able to pass the mirror test. Dogs, cats, and young human children all fail the mirror test." [Wikipedia]

What are my red cardinals up to? Perhaps at the back of their bush they have found a doorway onto another world. They have found a place at which, at a certain point in the day, perhaps quite a narrow time 'window', they encounter something quite uncanny - something we would call their reflection in the glass, but which must at first seem like a competitor. One can only imagine the conversations between boy and girl cardinal, and the confused jealousies: "There's another guy hanging around!". "Oh yeah - she looked like a pretty cool chick to me."

Parallel plate-glass windows on two sides of a house are known to be fatal for birds, not because they are frozen, petrified, by an encounter with their own image, but because they can see right through the glass and fly headlong into a broken neck, and a crumpled twitter. But at my window, there is perhaps not tragedy - more the stirrings of an avian uncanny. Heidegger writes about the way in which a great thinker can glimpse something but not truly recognize what they have glimpsed. Could a cardinal hop away from the window puzzled, having failed to see off the intruder?

We humans think we are safely perched in that higher category of beings that can see themselves in a mirror, opening up the possibility of reflection. And yet when the effects of what we are doing to the planet are reflected back to us in the shape of antarctic glaciers slipping into the sea, we seem unable to recognize our own hand at work. Might it not be that what we construct as the site of the red cardinal's puzzlement mirrors our own predicament? To 'see' what is in front of our nose, requires a Copernican shift of frame. As for the cardinals: the danger out there is not an alien intruder, it is us.

Harvesting solar reservoirs

2009-02-15T08:16:00.000-08:00

There are many ways of hauling logs out of the woods, and many animals that been used before powered wheels turned up (see images). One-man harnesses, dogs, mules, horses, bullocks preceded tractors, skidders, 4x4s etc. The secret is always to reduce friction at the log (ice is perfect, or water, or air [using aerial cables?]) - or skids, and maximize traction at the power source. Then these logs, which have collected solar energy over years, sometimes centuries, can be used to build houses, variably resisting insect attack, protecting their inhabitants against the elements (not least the sun). The labyrinth of the capitalization of power! Not surprisingly, the largest trees at YB are growing in the least accessible places, protected by the difficulty of hauling out their carcasses.

Halfway to the spring, fallen trees had blocked the path, both rooted on my neighbor's side of the creek. I had to clear them, so I planned on hauling them away. One had been a live cedar, about 12" diameter, lots of red wood, and over 40' high. The other of unknown brand, similar girth, but lighter after years of standing dead, and on its way being firewood. It could however, work as a semi-structural vertical support in a house (see old Japanese buildings). But how to move these trees out of there? I took out the 4x4 and a chain. Whoever invented the chain-hook that couples back onto one of the links, and grips, while being as easy as pie to decouple later, deserves a medal. Alongside the guy who invented the chain. (Or was it a gal, making a daisy-chain for her sweetheart, by splitting stems, and passing the earlier stem through the split?) There is something about a chain, and the mixture of mobility and strength that is quite impressive. Even a man in chains might glimpse this. ... I tied one end around each log, and hauled away. Once the trees get going, they slither along quite nicely, with protruding limb stubs gouging out lines in the damp mud beneath last fall's leaves. But there was a point on the trail that blocked the 4x4's access to the last tree. I needed a second chain to reach through, and paced out a 25' shortfall. Joe was coming round, so I asked him if he had a long chain - about 25' - if he would bring it. After putting the phone down, I thought - typically chains are not that long. Could we perhaps do with 20' by squeezing the 4x4 forward? Had my measuring-by-strides been too generous? Would we cope? If we had a 5' gap, could I use rope to bridge it? Joe turned up with the chain. It's only 20', he announced. The last log was the lower section of the big cedar, itself over 20' long. There may be a 5' gap, I said. I have some yellow poly rope, but it's not thick enough. Joe took the rope, looped it into three strands, tied bowline knots at each end, with triple loops, and we had our extra five feet. And bowline knots unslip after great tension. We needed the rope. At first the log would not move - it was at too much of an angle to the path, and sloping down to the creek. Thirty years ago I was leaving a monastery in Athos for the day, and five ancient monks were already at work, moving huge rocks with wooden poles. I had also seen video reconstructions of Stonehenge rock-moving techniques, using logs as rollers, as it happened. Poles worked wonders with us too, allowing weak humans to move weights we could not otherwise contemplate shifting. We know even birds use sticks to poke insects out of holes. Do they ever use them as levers? We got the log nicely back to under the front deck, and then argued about how long it was, pacing out the length with our bodies. Over 20', yes. But we staked our respective reputations on more exact figures before measuring it. 22'9" said the metal tape. We both lost the bet with technology, but gained about 2' of actual log. I will try to adjust my stride. At 17 it was exactly 3'. Now I think I am stretching my pace a little. It's either metrification (one yard = approx 3'3") - nostalgia for Europe? Or my misguided attempt at compensation for no longer being 17.

Thinking better

2009-02-14T08:50:00.000-08:00

I am at Tractor Outlet, buying galvanized wire to make a horizontal wire grape arbor over the front deck. The young man does not think they have the wire I want, but maybe it's outside. We find it, but it's not galvanized, he says. The label, however, says galvanized. It does not look like 374 ft in that $14.95 coil, but it is. "I live on a farm, he volunteered."
I select two 10lb coils.
"Strange," he said, "I thought galvanized was shiny. Where are you from?"
" Where are you from?" I ask.
"I was born right around here."
"I'm from England."
"I thought so, with that voice. What do you do?"
"I teach in Nashville."
"What do you teach?"
"Philosophy."
"Hey, I'm fixin' to take a philosophy course next year."
"That's good, it teaches you how to think."
"But I already know how to think."
"Well, it teaches you to think better."
"Is that right!"

Next stop: find a Muscadine grape vine to grow up the arbor.
And stand back.

'Tired' goat, tired horse

2009-02-02T07:16:00.000-08:00

Some moons ago, Molly returned from Birdsong Hollow Farm, complete with progeny. She was accompanied by a triumphant ribboned wreath, as if being given the freedom of the city. On Saturday she was spotted trailing the rest of the herd and sporting ... a wreath on her stubby horns. How could this be? An unsuspected Saturnalia among the cloven-footed? A late-night party? How could Molly have found the wreath, and begun to wear it? Had she been made queen? What was going on? A couple of years ago, I discovered that the sliced sides of car tires would form an effective donut-shaped ring mulch around a newly planted tree. One such slice with a frizzy penumbra had been left lying around. And somehow Molly had got it tangled in her horns. She was not parading, she was in distress. But would she let me near her to sort things out? She ran off, with the weight of this encumbrance dragging on her head. Yesterday I went back to find her, hoping she was worn out, and I could catch her. I found the herd, and feared the worst. No Molly. I talked to Buddy with my best dog-whispering. In the movies, the dog understands what you are saying, and takes you off to find the goat just in time to save it. Buddy smiled, but seemed to understand nothing. The goats were in two parties. There was a nursery at the barn, with the two nannies, and their five kids (two black, three b/w) - only days/weeks old. Then the main herd, from which Molly had been missing. They were coming back to YB central. And somehow Molly was with them this time - looking very tired, but wreath-free. Had she had help? Those goats cooperate in pushing over my wiremesh tree protectors, exposing the now protruding leaves for each other. Did they have a wreath-removing clinic after tea? OK so she did not need me. The goat herd has lost a few old guys, and seems well-served by some strong rams. Perhaps that's how there are still five kids, despite coyotes.

After this, it was time to check on the horses, if only to be reminded of their gently different natures. Big Mama had a little limp - arthritis? Stone in foot? Melissa will check. But Chance was worrying. He was lying down - mid morning. And did not get up. He seemed to have mud caked in his hooves. Wasn't that heavy-breathing? Was he dying? He did not respond to the ordinary excited encouragement that would have got me to my feet. Then he lay his heavy head down on the ground. He must be terribly sick. I tried calling Jay on his cell w/o success. Would we be able to pick up the body on the front-end loader? Could we leave it deep in the woods for Nature's helpers to help themselves? When all seemed lost, Chance got up and walked off. As he did so, I noticed that the patch of ground on which he was lying was no longer quite as much in the sun as it had been when he first lay down.

White mythology?

2009-01-24T12:18:00.000-08:00

In a now famous essay from the 60s, Lynn White argues that Christianity is to be held responsible for the growing despoilation of the earth, and the environmental crisis. As Genesis records, man is raised above the world in domination, in contrast to the pagan world, for which man is part of nature. This pagan vision it set out to eradicate.

We may find speaking of elves, pixies and dryads hard to take seriously, but the implication - that we can and need to negotiate with the natural world - with the trees, rivers and mountains - rather than simply try to impose our will upon them, is a thoroughly sound idea. Could we not put up with some silly names for the sake of a sensible policy? This suggests something completely revolutionary - that we evaluate ontological claims (Is there a God, are there pixies?) entirely in terms of the kinds of relation believing in them, or talking like that, would support. This way, perhaps lies Derrida willingness to speak of ghosts, specters etc.

This is not so crazy. It just means that we need to check ourselves at a different point. We can talk any way we like, assert the 'existence' of all sorts of things, but we don't confuse the different ways they exist. Things don't have to exist physically to have power. We misunderstand spiritual existence as something very thin, or wispy. Much more plausibly, spiritual existence is a projected background for certain possibilities of relationality, and sociality. Those who say this projected background 'does not really exist', (as I am tempted to), need to ask themselves, do "I" (or America, or Yellow Bird) exist in that strong sense? Or are these unities not importantly constructed around the relational possibilities they enable?

Next week - we will start a magical map of YB. And celebrate an ontology that lets a thousand flowers bloom.

Small Writing Cabin

2009-01-22T21:10:00.001-08:00

The lodge can seem cold in the dead of winter, or at least a big space to heat up with propane. I dream of a small writing cabin, perhaps 6x8' with straw bale walls that could almost be heated by the body working in it. An 18" straw bale wall has an R value of 54, which is way beyond any building code. I imagine a desk, some shelves, a window, a comfortable chair, and perhaps a loft bed. Perhaps some way of making tea/coffee?

In connection with this musing, I append an image of Heidegger's Black Forest hut, famous as a place of meditation, and now the object of a book length study by Adam Sharr. Compare Michael Pollan's A Place of My Own (two images below): "A room of one's own: Is there anybody who hasn't at one time or another wished for such a place, hasn't turned those soft words..." [See May 22 2009 for a follow-up].

Coral, cord wood and termites

2009-01-17T12:55:00.000-08:00

I cannot get over the discovery (and dating, thanks to Molly Miller) of the sheets of coral fossils on the limestone slabs - 450 million years old, or
thereabouts. Somehow I want to draw that fact into the YB experience. Options: one could try to make rubbings of them (or photograph them) and display them indoors, in a gallery structure nearby. Cf. Chris Drury's thumbprints/mushroom spore prints. One could try to recreate the originals in cement etc. But what is the point of any of these options? To facilitate a multi-leveled temporal awareness. Watching a spider spin its web, one also bears in mind the evolutionary process that has led to it having this skill. And that 450 million years ago, the earth had no humans - indeed no plants, no birds, no dinosaurs, or mammals - everything lived in the sea. So here we are, looking at this highly visible trace of a world that completely predates almost everything we know. Is this experience important? Heidegger said that to be truly at home (heimlich) in the world, it must also be a little unheimlich (strange?) to us. This temporal depth is one good way of bringing that about. It begins perhaps as a focal experience, and then turns into a modality or tonality of a broader capacity for experience. It may e.g. encourage making connections between things, it may draw attention to aspects of things unseen, it may allows us to see things in new ways. Perhaps we will have sharper eyes for process, for long cycles. Is 'seeing differently' not the point of art? I still don't know whether the art-object matters (however material or dematerial), or whether it is always a mere means to a new seeing, and in principle substitutable.

Today the cord wood pile was begun, and the results of December chainsawing collected from beside the new road. I raised a platform of treated wood on concrete blocks on the lower level outside the basement. This is supposed to discourage termites. Though some of these logs are surely already termite-infested. I imagine them dropping off, and looking for another home. I am preparing for the wood-burning stove, even as I read that as a planet we need to be heading for zero carbon emissions. Is it enough that these new stoves are highly efficient? Or that they will help me burn less gas? As I stack these logs I am reminded of one such stack I saw - in St Anton-am-Arlberg (Austria) when I was teaching English to a certain George at the age of 16. There the wood filled a cement arch at the front of the Pension. The sun dried it from the side, and the arch protected it from the rain.

Termites, some facts:

Termites have been around since the time of the dinosaurs!
Termite colonies eat non-stop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week!
Termites have wings that they shed once they have found a good place to build a nest.
Termites cause up to $2 billion in damage per year!
All Termites are social insects and raise their young as a group.
The total weight of all of the termites in the world is more than the weight of all the humans in the world.

But compared to coral, termites are new arrivals.
Termites = Terre-mites? Mites of the earth? How much entomology can we learn from etymology?

Thin Ice

2009-01-16T16:13:00.000-08:00

The lake and pond are frozen over. Long ago, living in Pointe Claire nr Montreal, the St Lawrence seaway used to freeze so deep that trucks could cross. Here, I dare not trust the ice with my weight. At the pressure of a foot, it already begins to creak and crack. The arctic air has really crept in everywhere. The horse-trough has only a dimple of open water on an inch-thick crust of ice, where the continuing trickle still keeps things liquid. How does it happen that moving water can be below zero? Do the horses understand that they can still drink? I took a hammer and made the pool a bit bigger. But I imagine it will freeze back again, incorporating the new iceberglets. The horses have grown hairy winter coats, but they do look cold. Could they be stolid sufferers and I not know it?

Heating this house when it's 10 degs Farhenheit is neither cheap nor easy. It feels like trying to use a summer house in th. e winter. If I had the stable cottage working I might well set up a small warm winter study there, like the polythene tent I once made in the attic in St Marys Crescent.

I'm on emotionally thin ice right now. YB is being suffused and invested with the kind of care that makes a place into a home, just as that same warmth is being withdrawn from Lothersdale, in the wake of my mother's death. Cannon County is not Yorkshire, and yet there are moments of mirror resonance. Struggling to stay warm is to struggle for the very idea of home.

But it is part and parcel of YB that it change seasonally. With the leaves down, the woods are more open, the trees more like writing against the sky. Less welcoming, more sparely beautiful.

A new year

2009-01-07T17:12:00.000-08:00

News: The aquasculpture is now submerged after the rain. A few more inches and the lake will overflow into the pond, and the whole system will be recharged. The horses look a bit wet and sad. Berzerker is confused. He wants to come in, but then wants to go out. Truth is that he knows he wants something, but understands that something in simple spatial terms. Really he wants to be stroked, but does not know it. Once successfully stroked, he abandons the inside/outside game. This is my replay of Freud's fort/da game. Religious belief, perhaps, is a similar translation of a desire we cannot articulate/acknowledge into one we can understand. 2009 will be the year of the great leap forward at YB. I have hopes that the funding for the residencies will be forthcoming, and that the collaboration with the Yorkshire Sculpture Park will move forward.

Art Program Proposal

2008-12-11T18:21:00.000-08:00

Yellow
Bird Sculpture Park

Place and Time: A Dialogue with Nature
Sculpture Residencies and Exhibition 2009

Proposal
To organize an inaugural exhibition of site-specific sculpture and earth-art at Yellow Bird Sculpture Park in the Summer/Fall of 2009. There would be four month long residencies (two for each of August and September), and 10 awards of $750 for costs involved in preparing and installing individual works selected from maquettes, proposals etc. The resulting exhibition would run for six weeks Oct 1 - Nov 15 2009.

Aim
To establish Yellow Bird as a site for displaying and enjoying outdoor sculpture and earth art, to promote the educational benefits of public art, and to bring local artists into contact with the wider international scene.

Budget
* Residencies [4] @ 1000 + travel (max $600), materials ($400), accom + misc costs $500 [$10000]
* Awards [10] @$750 (travel, materials etc.) [$7500]
* Prizes [3] $$ ($2500, $1500, $1000) [$5000]

Planning and organizational assistance [$5000]
Other costs (incl installation, advertizing and promotion) [$2500]

Total $25000

Collaboration hoped for with Vanderbilt’s Studio Art Department, and Cannon County Arts Center. Financial support tba

Wet dreams

2008-12-11T16:18:00.000-08:00

Everywhere cold grey rain - cascading off the gutters, soaking the screened-in porches, turning the horse pasture into a paddy field, spawning fractal rivulets, chasing the horses onto higher ground. Tomorrow, if it lets up, I must see if the lakes have filled again, swallowing the exposed submarine rock sculpture, repairing the effects of the summer drought. I am lucky to be able to welcome the downpour, even as it dampens the spirits. How far can one extend that principle of affirmation? Nietzsche once asked: How well disposed would one have to be to will the eternal return of all things? It is not just passive acceptance of the rough with the smooth, or a recognition of the interconnectedness of all things. It is a capacity to delight even in the ugly and misshapen. But we need to remind ourselves not to be sentimental. Can we not delight in the mosquito's aeronautical skills, and its delicate proboscis, even will its existence, in some sense, while slapping it into oblivion?

The rain pours into the night, turning grey wet into black wet. I think tonight is the night of the longest moon. Will its white glow dissolve in this rain? Or will it nonchalantly swim across the lake, staying as dry as a duck? If you watch very closely, can we see it pull itself up on the far side of the lake, and towel off?

I imagine unending rain. The Flood comes, surrounding the house, gently floating it off its foundations. It bobs like an ark. Grateful horses embark in pairs, joining the deer, the squirrels, the turkeys ... Global warming will have strange often dramatic consequences. Will YB return to being an inland sea, once more supporting coral, as it did 450 million years ago, the fossil evidence still shouting from the limestone slabs? Perhaps not: "The United Nations has found close to a third of the world’s corals have disappeared, and 60 percent are expected to be lost by 2030". We can surely embrace change, but not decay, dissolution, loss of diversity. Art is truly important in galvanizing our creativity, but it would all be in vain if it produced rainbow froth on flat beer, if the earth died even as we celebrated the latest crop of baubles. How can art bring a return to what makes the whole game possible? How can art become e(art)h?

Giving voice to other beings: Santa at Yellow Bird

2008-12-10T16:32:00.000-08:00

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/im-dreaming-of-a-white-christmas-xmas/2039833095

with thanks to Joe (the real plumber) Prince

Renewing the Peace Circle

2008-11-10T18:31:00.000-08:00

In April 2003 we created a Peace Circle of 21 trees about 65' across, and buried a time-capsule under one of these trees, with many poems and statements and small objects. 'We' had just invaded Iraq. Since then things have not gone well. And some of the trees in the circle have died or almost died. Some have already been replaced, but it would be a good time to take stock, tidy up and replace what needs replacing, perhaps with different species of trees. Can we plant honey locusts, which have huge thorns on both branches and trunk? They seem to thrive in that area, but what sort of message of peace would it send to plant heavily armed trees? There are also oaks, walnuts, cedars in the area. So, I will set aside this coming Sunday afternoon for druidic renewal. And bury a new time capsule sending into the future whatever people send or bring. Perhaps including a front page of a newspaper announcing Obama's election.

Changing a balance

2008-11-10T16:55:00.000-08:00

At the back of the house, the new road starts up the hill, then turns left along the old fence. At the elbow, there was a small cutting in the fence. Beyond: broken trees, and brambles, sloping downhill, past prickly pear cactus (!!), to a shady-dell area, with rippling gullies that channel away the rain. It has been neglected for decades. Huge osage orange trees commandeer vast footprints with their multiple carelessly splayed-out prickly limbs. Broken branches everywhere. It was all 'the other side of the fence', the far corner of the old Yellow Bird property. But it suddenly struck me what an enchanting area it would be if I cleaned it up. It is an apron of land that, if given a little care, would create a different gravitational balance to living in the Lodge. Just a little way up the road would no longer be a frontier onto the wild, but transition smoothly to something closer to parkland. (The challenge then - not to just domesticate it in predictable ways.)

I cut through about 50' of fence - a mixture of square roll fencing, and barbed wire. Some of the fence wire had cut deep into growing trees, and had to be clipped off with my amazing fencing pliers, the head of which, with its hooked nose and its hammer face, seems to have evolved about eight different functions. I pulled up two T-posts with Joe's heavily levered red post puller. And I coiled the old fence into a rusty brown roll. How to dispose of it? Even The Recycling Center does not want old wire - I think it jams their machinery. Farmers find a back gully and roll old wire into the next century. But the more I looked at it, the more it seemed like an opportunity rather than a problem. I came to see that it could be the armature of a vine-covered bird sanctuary. If I set this jumble of dead wire and fencing in a back from the path, just under the trees, and planted it in the spring with climbers, (or just left it for nature to invade), it would quickly become a haven for birds, protected by the wire from predators.

Removing the fence was a revelation. Just being able to walk across that divide was a special thrill and I took out some small saplings that had taken root in the old fence line. Establishing continuity between what shortly before had been inside and outside was a visceral experience. I could feel the land smoothing over under my hand as if it were flesh. I spent another couple of hours with my Echo chainsaw, trimming the thorn-festooned eye-spike level branches of the osage orange and the honey locust trees. And dragging the amputees deeper into the woods. Occasionally, there would be a backlash from a cut limb, and my right hand got pricked and torn and brimmed with blood. It felt right that I should be marked in some bright way. I was marching around trimming and tidying the world just as I wanted it. But it should not be an entirely one way process. I tried to leave eloquent shapes where I found them - arched branches, branches that fanned out horizontally. Sometimes I would trim them to look even more elegant or strange. Some of these dead grey trees are inhabited by dryads, with little entrances clearly marked.

I left the whole space ready to be bush-hogged with the tractor. It will reduce to clippings all the brambles that tear at one's clothes. Walking will become a pleasure, not a war. And where the branches were dragged off to - deeper into the woods, further down the hill - will become the new wild. If I have destroyed habitat by clearing the brambles, I have created more thickets a little further afield. And the horses will be able to run around without being torn up.

I just hope being mown down in November is not some sort of fillip for bramble growth in the Spring. If I hear the stubble murmuring "What does not kill me makes me stronger", I will have to reconsider my strategy. Meanwhile, I welcome the prospect of some stunning new spaces.

Druids Building Stonehenge

2008-10-25T12:29:00.000-07:00

Couldn't resist this.

Notes from Underground: learning from moles

2008-10-25T11:58:00.000-07:00

On 30 acres in Dumfriesshire Charles Jencks created his Garden of Cosmic Speculation, an 18th C garden 'full of ideas', as he put it. The ideas in question are highly abstract, modeling 'the cosmic architecture of galaxies, black holes, and the Big Bang', and provoke (in me at least) something of a double response. On the one hand, like the perfectly laid out geometrical forms of the gardens of Versailles, outside Paris, it looks like the imposition of human order onto a nature that must at all costs be tamed. On the other, the geometry in question is not that of angles and straight lines, but mimics the (mathematically describable) organic curves found at many different levels in nature, both cosmic and micro-cosmic (like DNA). And from the pristine photographs it looks as if landscape maintenance is a major task chez Jencks, with an enforced regime of grass mono-culture, the better to accentuate the curves, a cross between a canvas and billiard table cushions. It was with both delight and relief that I read that the invasion of part of Jencks' garden, Snake Hill, by moles and voles, had occasioned some head-scratching. As befits a very 18th C project, Jencks had spoken of "using the landscape to investigate what your beliefs are. And the appearance of the moles took this process forward. ... [Some] said we must get back to normal, and get it right, the way it was, and I thought a long time and said no, no, no, we must work with nature. And this is a very good illustration of catastrophe theory in action ... it's a co-creation with nature... nature makes a move, we make a move, and we're in dialog."

This is a great model for Yellow Bird as a Gesamtkunstwerk [total work of art]-in-process, in which, yes, there are ideas-put-into-action. But not only moles give you feedback. What is exciting about Jencks' moles is of course that moles are not just destroying, but creating whole underground earthworks, much more complex than the burial chambers of Egyptian pyramids, for example. An army of mini-James-Turrells. Half blind they may be, but they have, in a very positive sense, a highly developed 'tunnel vision'. (Cf. rats, famous for being better at solving maze puzzles than humans.)

Jencks' model of 'dialog' with nature is very productive. Returning from the sea, there is a peculiar reassurance in stepping on to 'terra firma'. Earthquakes understandably cause deep anxiety. 'Undermining' is almost always a negative term. Jencks' moles and voles caused part of the garden to 'fail'. Hegel and Marx played with the characterization of their own writing as 'molework', both in the sense of undermining and exploring, perhaps renewing what Kant had called the Groundwork of philosophy. /See ref. below/ For the most positive narrative, we might compare the vital role of worms in a fertile soil, aerating it at many layers, drawing down surface litter, digesting decaying organic matter into soluble nutrients, etc. Here, holes, tunnels, are communication pathways, transmission channels, part of the health of a living soil, rather than undermining a firm, dead, impervious solidity.

Walking around the lake last night, I found fresh mounds of soil on the grass.

"So, Yellow Bird is a Gesamtkunstwerk-in-process! Tell us more ..." [to be continued]

[See David Farrell Krell's article "The Mole: Philosophic Burrowings in Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche" in boundary 2, Vol. 9, No. 3, Why Nietzsche Now? A Boundary 2 Symposium (Spring-Autumn,1981), pp.169-185].

Shaping and mapping: sacred and symbolic

2008-10-25T09:58:00.000-07:00

Native Americans are said to treat as sacred the point of convergence of two creeks. I looked at some land with this feature many years ago, and I tried to breathe-in the sense of the sacred rooted in that place. Last night Joe explains this by saying that such convergences are sound map references. ("I'll meet you just past the fork in the creek.") How tempting it would be to think of the sacred as at least emerging with the discernment of a kind of natural writing, in which rivers draw lines on the land, and lines intersect, as in many letters of the alphabet. In such ways, the land begins to map itself. And in this doubling, this natural/symbolic laminate, perhaps we can find something of the sacred. (But what word did/do native americans actually use?)

This morning I started up the new road again, expecting (like last night) to find more clusters of deer, with their white flash tails marking their darting flight. Instead I found myself tidying up the rocks on the side of the road, forming a ring around the new rock cairn/roadside sculpture. Suddenly, chaos is turned into order, through minor rearrangement. And yet every rock I moved was the shelter for worms, beetles, larvae, and channel and tunnel patterns that would now be destroyed.

I could lament this, or celebrate the ongoing shaping and reshaping of the world that is our common task. Each rock in the new circle will provide a new shelter for insects etc. And out their windows, they will have an up-market view - of the cairn. Elsewhere at YB there are walls (stone fences), some of which seem functional (marking boundaries) and others not - just lines in the woods. They may have been made by gangs of slaves after emancipation who wandered around looking for work. Farmers would (I believe) have them clear rocks off the land so it could be ploughed, and these walls began at least as just neat ways of stacking them! There is a civil war 'monument' at the top of my neigbour's ridge. Or is it just a big pile of rocks, cleared from the surrounding area. Now a landmark. How the symbolic is born from the practical.

P.S. And why do deer exhibit their flight so vividly with those white lines on their erect tails. Couldn't a predator track them more easily?

Leverage

2008-10-22T21:02:00.000-07:00

Today's financial crisis has given prominence to the dangers of 'leverage', in which a small amount of money is made to do too much work, with the attendant risk that the house of cards will at some point collapse. In this world, leverage is associated with empty promises, excessive risk etc. But in the real world, leverage is a vital principle and power.

Beside the new road connecting old and new YB, there are many rocks, haphazardly abandoned by the bulldozer when the dirt stopped moving. Returning from a short morning walk, inspecting the germination of the feed-wheat scattered for erosion control on the banks of the road, I came across a small family of 7-8 rocks that called out to be stacked as a cairn. The large ones were hernia fodder - too big to lift, but not too big that one might not THINK one could lift them. Pondering the situation, I flashed back to another early morning scene outside a monastery on Mt Athos, in Northern Greece, where four elderly monks were moving enormous stones using wooden staves as levers. I quickly found just such a tool, about 5 ft long, made of cedar. And with its help I was able to slide one stone onto the base stone, and then swivel it into position by turning it on a proud point on its surface. With leverage there was almost no effort, where before the whole body strained in the heaving.

When we think about the history of fundamental inventions, it is easy to run forward to the wheel, and to forget altogether about the lever, which, before donkeys and horses, already made it possible for humans to move things they otherwise could not, giving us what is called 'mechanical advantage'. And so I aligned myself with the builders of Stonehenge (who also rolled stones on logs), achieving what seemed impossible, with simple equipment, ingeniously deployed. And with the bird who uses twigs to poke insects out of dead trees.

Nearing the top of the cairn, I lifted rocks directly, using the ropes and hawsers and bone-levers of my own frame. Can we really be 97% water? Well, my tractor's front-end loader runs on hydraulic fluid. Working with and against gravity. These rocks now look as if they have been there forever. Moss is colonizing the North face.

Laminate time

2008-10-07T15:17:00.000-07:00

It began with a dull morning sky and specks of wet in the air, an almost alien substance by now, triggering ancient memory. By mid-afternoon it was a soaking rain, rattling the tin roof in time-honored manner. The greying shoots of rye and wheat sown beside the new road to slow down erosion might yet recover. The local dustbowl created by the Haflingers' hooves will turn to mud. The cracks in the bare earth will begin to close and heal. The pendulum of nature will reaffirm itself.

The white rock sculpture exposed in the pond will start to be submerged again, simulating the erratic surfacing and drowning of Smithson's Spiral Jetty. The Aztecs are said to have cut the hearts from their victims, draining their blood down the temple steps to encourage the sun to rise again the next day - each red dawn gorged with sacrifice. And until the rain comes, pouring down the cracked throats of every parched shoot, every desperate tree, no-one can be sure it will return, that the cycle might not have been suspended. Already the fields have turned grey, a step or two closer to desert. When the dust turns to mud and the weeds sprout anew, some of these surface rocks will be sucked back into the pasture, and the history of this once limestone sea-bed will be hidden again from view.

We seem insulated from tectonic transformations by geological time. And yet the current financial meltdown looses on the world Foucault's spectre of the washing away of the human as the marks of birdsfeet on the beach are dissolved by the incoming tide.

Yellow Bird - with its Zygoptera (damsel fly) wingbeats at 60 per second, and its ordovician coral fossils some 450 million years old (sorry Palin), with its Civil War era pile of rocks on the ridge, its root cellar filled with domestic refuse, and its shadows of lost fields, is a vast theatre of laminated time, of pulsing rhythm and irresistible shifts, a medley of dances from the feverish and frenetic to a slow swirl welcoming death, inviting rebirth. Over millennia this same rain has scoured the limestone into living shapes that from time to time wake from their larval slumbers and crawl to the surface. Where we wait to meet them.

Yellow Bird Horse Rescue Mission?

2008-10-03T15:31:00.001-07:00

Today Jay and Melissa brought new recruits, Henry and Gracey, 17 and 20 yrs old respectively, two ‘white’ or ‘flea-bitten grey’ horses, destined to be shot behind the house by their impecunious owner. Both were ridden until a few months ago, but the kids involved have moved away, lost interest etc. and the cost of keeping them over the winter would have been too high. I didn’t know it was legal just to shoot a horse you couldn’t afford to keep. It would be so easy to require that anyone in that position first advertise the horse for adoption. ‘Flea-bitten grey’ is not meant literally, it’s rather a white coat with grey/black flecks. These two were not in bad shape, but needed, as it was said, more ‘groceries’. They had been living on a steep bare half-acre slope. Would they fall over on level ground? Their manes are badly tangled and knotted with neglect. It is easy to see how people can get into the business of rescuing horses. In the current economic climate, many people will ask whether they can afford to keep their horses.

I need to look more closely for wings, in case one might turn out to be Pegasus, the winged horse of legend. From a distance, it is decidedly possible. Even without wings, with gold bridles and a little coiffing, they could nudge the mythological.

Perhaps it was their arrival (and temporary quarantining while they are wormed), but that prompted enthusiasm on the part of their neigh-bors, the Heflingers, but not long after these three stooges managed to open the gate to their field and trot off down the drive. I gave chase with my 4x4, and captured and led Kaysee back into their field. Whereupon the other two returned and somehow persuaded Kaysee that he could jump the fence, and off they all went again. Angie, on the phone, suggested bribing them with food, and eventually I got them all back by shaking the bucket of sweet horse grain. It does look good – I might try it for breakfast.

So now, all seven horses are inside their respective fences, and all is right with the world. But I confess I am not quite sure about the whole fence thing. They say good fences make good neighbors. And yet it surely matters who decides where to put the fence, what is being excluded, under what conditions etc. We all want to be safe, but not in jail. Are these horses in jail? Must we not constantly, or at least regularly, justify every such fence, making it a playground rather than a jail – both the fences we make for others, those we submit to, and those we make for ourselves.

Building Dwelling Thinking Costing

2008-10-02T20:22:00.000-07:00

K tells me the writer’s cabin will cost about 100K to build. This is prohibitive, however reasonable. I persist in thinking it can be done for half that. But most of the work is done cheaply because it’s done frictionlessly in my head, or by elves. I come up with schemes for reducing construction to the simplest procedures involving 8x4 sheets of this and that, like Japanese tatami mats. Going down this path takes the routinizing use of right angles in building a step further, an approach which led Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophists to say that devil lives in the right angle. Enter Antoni Gaudi! But is originality impeded by fixed units, or does it simply require us to focus on how they are arranged? How different is that from using existing words to make new sentences rather than insisting on making new words? Traditional Japanese houses are proportioned by tatami mat units, but they do, it’s true, judiciously add the odd wooden branch.

My plan was to make (I had hoped) two or three such cabins, so that people could come and stay for a weekend or a month to finish that essay, or write that book, in an attractive peaceful setting. The style would be simple without being primitive. I am reminded of the Hotel de Filosophes in Amsterdam, in which each room was dedicated to a particular philosopher, had a select quote inscribed around the top of the wall, and a bookshelf of their books. I stayed in the Simone de Beauvoir room. It is an idea worth imitating, though perhaps one could ring the changes from month to month. Perhaps these cabins could be very much smaller than the 900 sq ft I was thinking of (on two floors). How much room does one need to live in? Is it easier to concentrate in a tiny space? With a deck! How about a well appointed tree-house?

Interview with JD previous owner, Sept 29 2008

2008-09-30T18:43:00.000-07:00

Joe D. came by the Lodge Monday in his gold SUV on the way to feeding the animals, looking very dapper. I sat him down on the porch for some oral history. He told me a lot about his own family history in these parts – ancestors (including some Woods!) turning up about 1824, joining a Primitive Baptist church. There were many schisms among the churches of the time, largely over leader’s personality. Cherokee used this part of TN as hunting grounds, and would set up temporary camps (e.g. in the next hollow). Any flints found here today would have been imported from elsewhere. ** Charlie Thornton found an arrowhead ‘factory’ at the end of the horse pasture.

Yellow Bird Farm (the main property) has been owned by:

Beecher Stroud (father in law of HH) sold to Hogan Hollis (see Hollis Creek Rd) - (father of Louise, Carol’s (Bob Melton’s wife) mother). HH owned a property that included Bob’s farm and what is now mine, and sold off Yellow Bird to Woodrow Shelton (1945) (father of wife of Elmus Tenpenny – I met Woodrow a couple of years ago before he died) - he drained the small existing pond (claimed there were mega-mosquitos). He had tenant farmers growing tobacco, hogs, dairy cows: the Reedy’s (son George), the Willey’s (?), the Thomas’s. He sold to Johnny Huff, who sold to Grady Ratliffe (the farm still had cornfields behind the poultry shed). He ran out of $$, and the farm went to Ode Pettigo (realtor?), who sold it to Joe Davenport (1964), who sold it to me.

[The Lodge was built for Priscilla Woodward and Charlie Thornton in 1996 by Tom Bean. Built from 4x4 pine wood reclaimed from a whisky distillery, and from sunken cypress recovered from the Mississippi in/near Memphis. Sold 2005 to Pat and Julie Fann, then to me Spring 2008. Ralph Hall built the connecting road for me with his bulldozer in May 2008.]

The only previous name Joe knew was Rebel Hill Farm, which he once gave it at the suggestion of one of his pupils. The big field above the farm pond was Back field, and the field with the old pear tree, Pear Tree field. Apparently the pear tree was old when Louise was a child (she is in her 70s). Said to be a ‘Bosch’. Looks more like a Keiffer to me. Either way, ripens in October. I am picking fruit now and storing them in the basement. Ethylene from ripe bananas in the same brown bag apparently accelerates ripening.

Why ‘Yellow Bird’ Farm? Probably an associative mix of childhood visits to Yellowstone, affection for the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the name of a calypso song, and a certain natural ring of innocence and delight. I was standing outside the barn with Joe a few weeks after I bought the place. “So, you’re calling it Yellow Bird” he said. “Do you see those birds on the fence?” “Yes I do” “Blue birds” he declared. And then with a twinkle: “In the spring we get bright yellow goldfinches – you’ll see.”

Words can be like birds. You are searching for the right word, when – how did it get there? – you find it’s perching on your shoulder.

Mapping and naming

2008-09-28T14:32:00.000-07:00

Naming and mapping. What’s in a name?

To share Yellow Bird with sculptors, earth-artists, friends etc. – especially from a distance - I need to be able to provide some sort of map. Perhaps I too need a sense of it as a dispersed but articulated whole. I can get both a plat and a topo map from the Court House in Woodbury, but it will lack any location names. So I have set myself the task, the pleasure, and the adventure, of devising a palette of names for the significant sites. Immediately, the whole question of ‘place’ jumps out. If place is meaningful spatial location, what role do names play? Establishing, creating, opening, extending, provoking, commemorating …. meaning? Should we name everything at the same time, as if by divine decree – like the ‘world’ of Narnia, or the Hobbit – so that the names all seem to have been baked in the same oven? Do we deploy literary allusions, chance associations, portentous redeployments? Do we let names accumulate over time, as memories accrete and inspiration upbubbles anew? (Yes, that seems right.) And who does the naming? Here I welcome input - imaginative, biographical, commemorative … YB is a shared space – with bipedic and polypedic friends alike - or it is a poor thing. Can I listen to the other-than-human for guidance?

Yellow Bird Solar Research Institute. I filled a black 55 gallon oil drum with water and placed it in the sun. As it filled up, the outside metal was cold below the water level, and hot above it. So it seemed to be radiating heat within. But at the end of the day, it seemed sub-tepid. So much for a free daily drum bath. I guess it’s radiating heat back out again. Next step – try to find a big clear plastic bag and some spacers to create a greenhouse effect. (The official solution creates an insulated glass box.) Watch this space.

Word and world

2008-09-27T17:02:00.000-07:00

Life at Yellow Bird: In the mornings I am writing a book: Fatal Projections: Pathologies of Alterity. Most of the chapters are written or drafted – typically versions of papers I have given over the last two years. But as much as they do fit together, I am struggling to clarify an integrative theoretical basis. I am looking for a streamlined general account of ‘projection’ both as necessary for sanity and as empirically variable and ethically charged. I think of Kant, Feuerbach, Freud – but how to sew them together? In the face of this challenge, I went in for displacement on Friday, and cleaned out the fridge. Out went rotten containers, moldy sachets, out of date cheese (yes, I’m not yet a vegan). Was I modeling for myself the difficult practice of throwing stuff away. Practice on dead broccoli, move on to bad first drafts.

Today, I must have been continuing to externalize the task of organizing mental/textual space. I got it into my head that there was a part of YB that had too long been out of bounds, the steep brambly slope up to the ridge above Pearson Pond. Surely my 4x4 would handle that. I could take shears and a Japanese pull hand-saw to clear the way. An hour later, having got lost, stalled, and ripped up by nature’s precursor of barbed wire slashing my forearm, I began to regret my venture. Large logs obstructed the way. Trees too close to pass between blocked my passage, and everywhere dangling strands of thorns. At the same time, the drive to return and ‘conquer’, with more serious equipment and a team of trail-blazers, was hard to repress. The better to ‘care’ for the place. Perhaps we need a little control for care-taking to happen. Anyway, with an arm crimson-speckled with thorns, I looked forward to returning to writing and thinking, less bloody forms of the sanguine.

In trying to think about projection, I note that cleaning the fridge and trying to cut paths through the wilderness are precisely forms of projective externalization, displacing a problem with a less promising form onto a space in which ‘it’ seems more tractable. But on this occasion, at least, surely it’s not the same problem. There is just an analogy between the two problem situations. I still need to return to sorting out my book’s conceptual map. All I will have gained is a certain renewed confidence in tackling difficulty. Or, worse, a confirmation of Sartre’s dictum that ‘les choses sont contre nous’, and that sometimes they win.

I went by Bob’s and picked up the boards I had sorted out from the old building I agreed to tear down for him. I plan to make a French Country Table, 8’ x 30”, with breadboard.ends by gluing them tight onto plywood. Narrow so that you are close to people sitting opposite. Are the boards oak? Poplar? Some of each? Can a warp be flattened out with screws or glue? The classic joinery advice is to use round pegs in oval holes to hold the end pieces, so the width can ‘move’. Another nice example of strength through flexibility. Pleased to discover that the poison ivy I thought covered the building is or was largely Virginia creeper. I feared the worst. Vines of mass destruction. How can we prevent ourselves being governed by fear? Imagination is good; fearing the worst bad. How/when can we subject imagination to ‘reason’, or at least a certain reflection?

Reigning cats and dogs

2008-09-26T15:41:00.000-07:00

Joe leaves a note. His truck is sick, he is out-of-town, and can I feed Buddy and the cats? Buddy's trough is full, but he starts eating when I arrive. Do some eat because they are lonely, and others cannot eat when they feel lonely? Or is Buddy eating in front of me just to show willing? Joe has left him table scraps (on top of regular biscuit chow) - against all vets recommendations - is Buddy trying to tell me he is OK with that? I get to the cats. Again full bowls. And a big surprise - five tiny kittens - two ginger and three blue/grey. All perfect miniatures, with sparkly heads. Unlike their parents they let me handle them. Should I break the feral cycle by doing this everyday. Should I have them all vetted? (This would make them expensive coyote breakfast.) Or should I take a ginger one for Berserker to play with? In memory of Tigger at 2 Emscote Rd? I feed Angie's three Heflingers their own special mix. Plus half a pear each. They take the fruit with their big rubber lips. Do they know to avoid using their teeth, or is that just good luck every time?

I drive on with my 4x4, and take a tour of the estate. Much to do if I want to host a sculpture competition[exhibition etc next summer/fall. To begin with, maintain all trails, and map the whole area, with names. How to invent names? I could draw on a literary model (Tigger was lifted from W the Pooh). Or wait for memories and associations to arise. Or?