What a wake-up!

I woke up, journalled for an hour on paper, Angus is making hash browns and I'm making a smokie from that meat thing I have, and I opened up lj to this poem:

Girl on a Tractor

I knew the names of all the cows before
I knew my alphabet, but no matter the
subject; I had mastery of it, and when
it came time to help in the fields, I
learned to drive a tractor at just the right
speed, so that two men, walking
on either side of the moving wagon
could each lift a bale, walk towards
the steadily arriving platform and
simultaneously hoist the hay onto
the rack, walk to the next bale, lift,
turn, and find me there, exactly where
I should be, my hand on the throttle,
carefully measuring out the pace.

Joyce Sutphen

I was going to go to the farmer's market today, but instead here I am at home still-- it's okay, I don't have any money anyhow. I'd like to get up to Juggler's and pick the raspberries he offered me at some point, and I'd love to get down to trade with Sara for some flour (she was part of the grain CSA last year and has lots) since I didn't get to the "flour peddler" guy who grinds it on his bike grinder at the market.

I invited Juggler to lunch yesterday and it was awesome. Again talking apocalyptic scenarios (this is what replaces TV and video games in my conversational repertoire) I was mentioning that I think Africa will be better placed in a sudden collapse than we will, because the skills that they are having drilled into them in the hardest possible way about sustainability and land management will be more entrenched there than here (they have already had their apocalypse in many places, or are having it now); the relocalization movement is helping here, but we aren't there yet. And I mentioned grain-- 10 years ago there was no one within 250 miles who knew how to grow grain in our climate; now there is some local. Sure, it's one or two guys, but the skill exists where it had been lost for so many years. And I mentioned the flour peddler, and that he knows how to make the device that does it _right there_ and that is a measurable achievement.

Juggler said, "no he doesn't!" with emphasis-- and I asked him if he'd ever watched "The Gods Must Be Crazy." That's foundational to my idea of permaculture and apocalypse-- that we have relics, rescources, byproducts that will be intensely useful for many generations of people who do not have the manufacturing ability to create them.

Or, you know, maybe we'll adapt and it will not all go down in that way, manufacturing will shift rather than stall, things will change in ways I can't imagine. But this is my game.

I love talking to people who contradict me, and I love talking to people who will play this game with me. The Chrises are both good at it.

Food. Mmm.

Quote

..from a book I really want to get now, called "Trauma Farm"

We hired a young woman, a university student working her way across the country, to help in the garden, but when she learned I was going to be slaughtering chickens she begged to assist me. This seemed a little twisted at first. While I slaughter animals, I’ve never enjoyed the job, unlike some sadistic farmers I’ve met. She explained that she loved eating meat, and that, like me, she believed it was two-faced to eat meat without having, at least once, participated in the slaying of a living creature. So I said: “Okay,” curious about how this lovely, city-raised, idealistic student would deal with the passion play of death.

Over the years, I’ve developed a simple system with minimal stress for both me and the chickens when I am slaughtering. It’s more complex and much sadder when I’m forced to drive them to the slaughterhouse an island away. I gather the chicken up, holding it until it’s calm, loop the baling twine around the legs, and hook the twine over a nail in the rafters of the woodshed. Then in a swift move I slide the killing blade into its brain through its beak, and let the chicken drop and hang, killing it instantly.

Hardly anyone witnesses real, violent deaths today. Our knowledge of death is now a product of Hollywood films, where the standard victim clutches the heart, or the wound, and keels grandly over, dead. Those deaths are one in a thousand. Almost all creatures when they die release their natural electricity, especially when they bleed out. The bird is already dead, but around 90 seconds after its death it will convulse and shake wildly. As soon as I kill the brain I cut the throat, or sometimes cut the head right off. When the electric death throes begin the convulsing headless chicken will usually just shake and die, but the occasional chicken will flip so hard, it will leap right out of the baling twine and run around, somersaulting and shaking in the ecstatic dance of the death of the nervous system.

The first chicken I killed with my helper watching did exactly that. I was so used to the death convulsions I didn’t think anything about it; then, to my surprise the girl began doing the same dance. She suddenly started screaming and strutting a high, weird-stepping ballet in front of the convulsing chicken. It was completely physical, unthought, visceral, a kind of communion with death and a simultaneous rejection. The guttural noises coming out of her matched her spastic ballet, which echoed the chicken death.

I had no idea what to do. “Are you alright?” I asked when she finally slowed down. A dumb question in the circumstances.

“Yes... yes...” she gasped. “No... no... that was extreme... O man I had no idea... O that was awesome...” She finally choked back her shock and smiled shyly at me, embarrassed. “Wow, I had no idea it would be that real.”

Nights Like These

Other people drink, or smoke weed, or do extreme sports. I read poetry; tonight is a Neruda night, as dangerous as you get. Everyone knows this poem, but still:

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

translated by W.S. Merwin

Merwin himself wrote this, so really it's not just Neruda but the double whammy of poet and translator-poet:

On the Subject of Poetry

I do not understand the world, Father.
By the millpond at the end of the garden
There is a man who slouches listening
To the wheel revolving in the stream, only
There is no wheel there to revolve.

He sits in the end of March, but he sits also
In the end of the garden; his hands are in
His pockets. It is not expectation
On which he is intent, nor yesterday
To which he listens. It is a wheel turning.
( Read more... )

I speak of him, Father, because he is
There with his hands in his pockets, in the end
Of the garden listening to the turning
Wheel that is not there, but it is the world,
Father, that I do not understand.