Catch a Fire

For the first time since Aught Eight, I saw the turtles out today in Morningside Park, sunning on the rocks along the edge of the pond and floating out in the water and taking part in relaxing turtle activities. I take this as a good omen.

This year, St. Patrick's Day brings a sense of floating: a world adrift in a bellicose, uncertain time; sliding masses of humanity through migrations, excisements, shallow-rooted wanderings; and optimistic lanterns wave-lashed yet speckle the dark.

And today feels like spring. Spring. Truly Scrumptious. [Side note: did everyone besides me know that the authors of Chitty Chitty and Casino Royale were one in the same?]

Only 19 days till Opening Day. Light till nearly 7 PM. Turtles up and about. Spring is here. Sure, we could yet get lashed with the cat-o-nine-storms, but today I heard the thwap of baseball on leather gloves, uncreaking after a winter's nap. Like turtles, another good omen. Hope you too are floating a little lighter in your shoes, be they have toes curled back or otherwise.

In honor of St. Patrick's adopted island and the graces all around us, from Gerard Manley Hopkins, Irish Jesuit mystic poet - all great things:

34. ‘As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme’
AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:	5
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.
Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;	10
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Mother Nature don't do bailouts

(photo courtesy: http://creative-commons-photo.com/image/61-humpback-whale)

Thomas Friedman asks, in his Op-Ed in today’s New York Times, “What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall – when Mother Nature and the market both said: ‘No more.’”

For years, I’ve fed on writers who have shouted similar messages from their pulpits, smaller and less amplified than the New York Times usually but pulpits nonetheless. I have long been a convert to various strains of “Less can be More” credos of consumption, if at times admittedly lapsed in my dedication. Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry before him have long argued for a combination of personal and collective action to counteract prevailing destructive forces of contemporary capitalism; Gary Snyder and Annie Dillard are champions of the wild that is out there and in us; E.B. White examined work, craft, and community; Henry David Thoreau filled reams in an attempt to walk the walk he was talking.

Recently, I’ve sat down with more sobering fare: The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, I Am Legend starring Will Smith to name two. Both ask related questions: How might we push ourselves over the cliff edge? What will the ensuing post-apocalyptic world look like? A related, though ultimately more uplifting movie is the fantastic Whale Rider [If you haven’t yet, see it.]. A subplot that shook me was the story of whales. Whales elude conveyance – by saying that a house is large, blue, and south-facing, have I showed you what kind of home it is? Whales, like the dolphins in A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, may yet leave. I think I should resume a previous habit of answering, whenever asked, “What animal would you choose to be?,” – a whale.

While I can’t swim like whales, what lessons can I learn from them? Put another way, how can I better walk the walk of a concientious consumer/educator/friend/citizen? What can I do to help restore balance? What am I, what are we doing differently in 2009 that will help us climb up to greater stability, sustainability, and symbiosis? Symbiosis?

Yes -- "sym·bi·o·sis, noun 2. a cooperative, mutually beneficial relationship between two people or groups." To this definition I would add “or systems” – educational, health care, political, financial, energy, industrial, military, transportation, commercial... What systems will we create to ensure that Mother Nature and the market, our families and communities can look back and say, confidently and gracefully: “Never again.”

Frank Sinatra famously sang

Frank Sinatra famously sang of New York that it's the city that never sleeps. The other night I was reminded of those nocturnal whirrings that prove Old Blue Eyes true. Walking the streets of a quiet Chinatown, Sunday nearing midnight, I noted a well-dressed family trailing strings of gold balloons; wooden packing crates broken down and stacked, the cooling asphalt releases scents of tar, fish, dirt. Across the street from Fire Department Engine Company 9, the oldest in New York and home of the Dragon Fighters, is Wing KEI Noodle Inc. Through doors open wide to the night I could see a world in miniature all in white: walls, uniforms, lights, ceiling, flour, floors, paper hats, thin rolled noodles.

I remembered that the composer Nico Muhly lives nearby; perhaps he buys Wing KEI noodles or maybe bobbins from the sewing store or fried chicken from Popeye's on the corner (whose signs are all in English and Chinese). I do know that he is merely 26 and composes pieces for quartets, orchestras, choirs. After reading this article, I know that Muhly draws on numerous and disparate sources for inspiration: medieval cosmologies, David Bowie, Egyptian archaeology, Italian Fascist architecture, the history of the novel, Balinese gamelan music – a frenetic, omnivorous taste.

On Easter Sunday last month, my family and I had the pleasure of attending services with my friend Gabrielle at Middle Church in the East Village. In addition to a pair of choirs (one of which showed in rocking form that "gospel" is a state of mind that can leapfrog matters of heritage), the services featured a jazz quintet, a "maverick organist," and a parade of children in silly hats. The musicians and the traditional choir premiered Muhly's Christ and the Whale. The soloist sang in a spirit from beyond the church, a clarion bell. And they rolled the rock away and there was... music? Light?

After prodding from the musical director and his mother seated beside him, Muhly stood briefly to accept our applause. He waved once, bent fractionally at the waist in partial bow, and sat. Sitting directly behind him, I had the chance to be the first to shake his hand. A unique, intoxicating experience – melting the late winter blues away among human nightingales, bald dynamo choir directors, rainbows and sermons on looking for love in all the wrong places, congratulating an avant-garde composer on the occasion of the world premiere of one of his works.

Muhly is one of les enfant terribles. Which also happens to be the name of a café around the corner from Wing KEI. Ah, New York.

Watching all the cars go by, roaring as the breezes

Trains bombed with words, here and there around Italy:

I dance to the beat, shuffle my feet
Wear a shirt and tie and run with the creeps
'Cause it's all about money, ain't a damn thing funny
You got to have a con in this land of milk and honey

They push that girl in front of a train
Took her to a doctor, sowed the arm on again
Stabbed that man, right in his heart
Gave him a transplant before a brand new start

I can't walk through the park,

'Cause its crazy after the dark
Keep my hand on the gun, 'cause they got me on the run

I feel like an outlaw, broke my last fast jaw
Hear them say you want some more,
Livin' on a seesaw

Don't push me, 'cause I'm close to the edge
I'm trying not to lose my head
It's like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder
How I keep from going under

- Grandmaster Flash, The Message

Dancing in the dark

Last night I went to church. There were over 11,000 congregants, eight deacons, and one high priest. By the end of the service, I could have spoken in tongues. If I still had my voice. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band tore through Milan’s Datch Forum like a steam train running full-head downhill and I willingly went along for the ride.

[photo source: popmatters]

Until last night, I had never seen Bruce Springsteen live. When the show went on sale back in September, my friend David and I tried in vain to buy tickets. Hope does spring eternal - through a series of fortuitous turns, we found ourselves grinning like fools walking onto the floor of the Datch Forum for last night’s show.

I have heard from friends and read reviews of Springsteen's legendary energy. Backed by a drummer, two keyboardists, a violin/fiddle/guitarist/vocalist, a bassist, two vocalists/guitarists, and one mean saxophone player, Bruce lived up to his reputation. Most of the songs were from their new album, Magic, which I have not yet heard. I could not sing along, but as with attending mass in Latin or other unknown languages, I could still participate in the rites and rituals, feel the reverence. The concert was 2 ½ hours of chanting and shaking and hand waving and singing. Without rest, even between songs – a quick drum change from cymbal and high hat to kick bass snare overdrive – in the few moments of transition while the band wrapped up the previous song, Bruce would douse himself with a carwash sponge soaking in a bucket by the drummer’s feet, shake his head snorting like a horse at the gate, and charge 1 2 3 4 into the next song’s beat over the decrescendo of force. Centrifugal and centripetal.

Some will scoff and say dismissive things of Bruce. Others will bristle at the comparison of a rock concert to a religious experience. What I know is this: never have I seen a band and crowd so earnestly, unselfconsciously in sync about the joy of music. I have drunk the Kool-Aid.

A rose by any other name

The magpie is back, outside my window, walking with exaggerated strides and short hops. From the spotty lawn, she pulls seeds? worms? Her black head and shoulders look like an executioner’s hood and the flash of blue on her wings is captivating.

Back home, I am so-so with flora and fauna identification, an area I would like to improve. I felt most knowledgeable in the montane zone of Colorado where I worked for a few seasons, though the relative symplicity of the ecosystem there made it easier to learn than the crowded temperate forests of southern New England.

Here in northern Italy, I’m most often unknowing when it comes to the natural world. I have plenty of opportunities to see plants and animals that invite investigation, especially on my runs out along the Via dei Mulini, about which I have written before. Long elegant herons are justifiably skittish and leave off whenever I approach within 100 meters. Nutria, large riparian rats, are hunted systematically by farmers during the fall, after the corn and hay have all been take in; an invasive species, they are unwelcome and left dead on the sides of the road. During this season, I have also seen the men wandering the fields, usually with baskets and dogs, searching for mushrooms.

The European magpie I knew by name. It was not the bird baked into a pie, though that “Sing a Song of Sixpence” nursery rhyme, like many others, has an interesting back story – this one with pirates! Arrrr! The magpie, as I found in my research, is common throughout European folklore and is often associated with unhappiness and trouble. Occhio!

The list of plants and animals to look into grows. I will never be the Thoreau, Abbey, or Muir of Codogno, but perhaps I can take part in the ancient practice of naming the world around us.

A poem on names and the light inside the named.

34. ‘As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme’
by Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: 5
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces; 10
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Do you believe in magic?

Somewhere the sun is shining. Not Mudville. Not Cleveland. Not even Codogno yet, but Somewhere is here in northern Italy, there in Cambridge and Andover and Hingham, down in East Greenwich, up in Rye and Passamaquody, over in Millers Falls and Alaska and Davis and Manhattan and Kampala and Oregon and... Red Sox Nation is smiling in the sunlight.

It is 6 o'clock in the morning here and I'm about to go to bed. Again. I slept the first time until 2 AM when Mark and I woke up to watch baseball on the Internet. Game 7 of the ALCS. Red Sox and Indians. These things at least are sure: Papelbon is sick but he don't need no doctor; Pedroia is small and plays yooge; gutsy Coco is into leather; Youk is doing the Monster Mash just in time for Halloween; Big Papi is... Big Papi; the Sawx are wicked good... I could go on, but the final score says so much so simply: 11-2. Good night and good luck.

The New England Patriots are filthy. The Bruins are heating up. Boston College football is #2 in the country. The Red Sox are going to the World Series. I think my fantasy elementary school lunch-time floor hockey team is even still undefeated. This is beautifully absurd. Perhaps I'm dreaming...

It is 6 o'clock in the morning and I'm going to bed. Andiamo.

Blog Action Day

Today I learned that it is Blog Action Day, an international call to arms focusing on the environment. [Thanks to Michelle at bleeding espresso for alerting me.] My mind staggers when I consider the task at hand... How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. One bicycle, one appliance, one letter, one tote bag, one light switch, one song, one clothesline, one conversation...

To return once again to Robert Frost, three more things I am sure are true: books, our connection to the natural world, and the possibility for change. Unfortunately, the first can be hard to read and may be an endangered species in some areas; the second is tenuous and frayed for many of us; and the third is often convicted without a fair trial. Thankfully, the first can also be dangerous and empowering; same goes for the second and third.

Rocky Mountain Institute - Thanks to my friend Dan for the thoughtful link. Much like the words to Imagine, the recent speech by Amory Lovins included on this site is naively optimistic and quixotic by some standards. Is this man crazy to profess that we can solve our problems? Was Lennon? Dr. King? RFK? Having just finished watching Bobby, a powerful movie about the day of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, the spectors of fallen visionaries loom large before me. I am my parents' son, and their characters were forged in large part during that turbulent time. Over the weekend, they saw a production of The Man of La Mancha; my mom reminded me that we can still dream the impossible dream. We can. For a start, we should be tilting at oil derricks and putting windmills in their place. And riding bicycles.

Most of my favorite writers can be grouped together on a stage, or better in a tent, or better yet on a ridge labeled "Nature/Environment." Thoreau. Edward Abbey. Jack Kerouac. Gary Snyder. David James Duncan. Annie Dillard. Wendell Berry. Bill McKibben. Some of them might not get along with each other; others were downright anti-social. Individually and especially collectively they are dangerous, possibly in the way Don Quixote's tales of chivalry were dangerous. One thing I can guess: if Abbey saw me typing this, he'd probably guffaw and tell me to throw my computer at something and get on with it. If you haven't read any snarling writers recently, maybe you should. I should.

One book I would pick up tonight if I had it with me is Poets on the Peaks by the photographer John Suiter. It is a beautiful book about Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Jack Kerouac, their friendships, and the time each spent as fire lookouts in the North Cascades in Washington State. I have long wanted to serve as a fire lookout, but I don't know if I will make it. I can live vicariously. Whalen, in a letter to Gary about his explorations of Buddhism, wrote:

Personally I feel the need for the Mahayana kind of deal - coming back to the village with gift-bestowing hands, as differing from the Vedantist and Hinayana kind of solipsism. But I don't say that their kind isn't needed; the world needs more sages than anything else right now. More prayer wheels, more visions, more poems, more magic.

Amen, Phil. In order to understand what you're saying, I have some more research I need to do, some more bites I need to take, but I second that.

The greatest earth on show.

Travelin', parte quattro

Bella Roma. Mark and I went down to Rome late Friday to meet his parents and his family friends Jane and Terry before they all headed back to the States. After a long and convoluted trip, we arrived at the plush hotel [note to self: be sure to travel when possible with people who like to stay in fancy places] in time to go to bed.

In the morning, Mark and I set out on what will easily be one of the most memorable and certainly most historic runs I will have the pleasure of running in in my life. As an introduction to Rome, it sure beats the sardine-can red tourist buses with the open tops. The city speaks for itself, but it also helped that Mark lived in Rome for a few months back in 2005. In addition to the echoes of Caesars, Michelangelo, fratricide, and il Duce (no, New Yorkers and Chicagoans, I’m not talking about a 53-year old Cuban pitcher with a high leg kick), Rome holds memories ‘round most corners for Mark. Running tour guide anyone? Mark almost worked as exactly that when living in Rome; luckily he ran with me for free.

Approaching from the west, Mark and I ran towards the newly risen sun; stopping in front of the Acqua Paola fountain, we tried to catch our breath only to have it whisked away by the view of the city stretched out before us, throwing off its nighttime blanket of mist and haze. Dropping down the hill into the city, Mark and I ran past many of the nearly infinite famous sights of Rome: the Coliseum, the forerunner of nearly all modern sports’ stadiums, looking like she could still host some games; the Forum, the Circus Maximus and the Palantine Hill; along the Tiber River; countless piazzas, including the Piazza del Campidoglio with its geometric paving, surrounded by the Capitoline Museums, which opened to the public in 1734. Last time I checked, we in the colonies were still operating under a pre-mercantilist economy at that point, 40 years off from our own first museum – though work may have begun on the Giles Corey mannequin in Salem, MA.

The home stretch of our run led us through Rome’s largest landscaped park, Villa Doria Pamphili. After the enrapturing maze of alleys and monumented thoroughfares, Mark and I were thrilled to run free like gazelles (or water buffalo, depending whose stopwatch you trust). It is a gorgeous park that curves along the crests of hills south of Vatican City, full of historic villas, African savanna trees and grasses, Romans exercising, a hedge maze, space.

After a stout breakfast at the hotel, we merry band of six set out to conquer Rome. We walked approximately 72 kilometers, each of us wearing through at minimum two pairs of shoes. We revisited many of the sights on the morning run itinerary, this time at walking pace and with the requisite POSes (photo opportunity stop) every 7 feet. Other highlights included the requisite Trevi Fountain and Spanish Steps; tap-dancing buskers in Piazza Navona, which may house the first instance of sculpture as a medium for trash talking; the Pantheon, which is the most pagan-temple-feeling church I’ve ever been in; peeking through the window at World Cup rugby outside the Abbey Theatre Pub; the sun setting behind the Coliseum; the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli and her long staircase, built at the end of the bubonic plague. An unusual way to celebrate maybe, but a beautiful setting.

In full disclosure, I was in Rome for all of 36 hours and found nearly everything beautiful. During the weekend, Ray Allen, a new addition to the Boston sports pantheon (more on that in a moment), was stopped by a Roman policeman for riding his scooter into a no-drive zone. In the related article, Ray is quoted as saying, "Wow! What a city! They keep their ruins!" Yes, there is a lot to see and I clearly need to return.

The question of the hour is: Will I ever again have the opportunity that occasioned our visit in the first place? Boston Celtics. Playing the Toronto Raptors. In Rome. Yes, it was a pre-season exhibition game, and yes, the starters didn’t play the entire fourth quarter, and yes, there was no organ player pumping up the crowd but... a) the cheerleaders are already in great form; b) team mascots dunking a basketball by launching themselves improbably through the air off of trampolines looks cool in any language; c) Paul Pierce is a beast; and, most significantly, d) Kevin Garnett is an even bigger beast and has single-handedly upped my caring factor for the NBA to Code Orange. Or something higher than it was before.


In addition to living la bella vita en bel paese with a lifelong friend who triples as jogging tour guide, link to fun-loving, bank-rolling parents, and Italian slang translator, I get to be a Boston sports fan during an unusually giddy period. If I pinch myself anymore, I won’t have any pinches left for the babies when I throw my hat in the ring for the 2016 Presidential election. Go Sox, Pats, BC Eagles, et al.

Mille mille grazie to the Langones for including me in their vacation. Here are some photos from the whirlwind day.

Fields and mountains

I walked out into the fields at dark the other night. Partly I was curious to see what the path I run almost every day was like after sundown, and partly I wanted to face, even in passing, some of those fears of darkness that seem ingrained in us. The town’s development ends at a rounded curve where the path begins – or ends, depending which way you’re going. The path is mostly paved but not lit. At a turn, I veered off the pavement. I watched my step through cornstalk stubble, the field having recently been shaved. I heard a splash in the fieldedge irrigation ditch; I suspect it was a nutria spooked by my arrival. [Nutria are rodents the size of small beavers that live in waterways, marshes, bayous, swamps, and the like.]

The path is technically a road, connecting our town with an outlying village, the frazione of Mulazzana, and so is used by cars, mopeds, tractors, threshers, trucks, bicycles, tillers, walkers, runners, and other sundry motorized farm equipment. And nutria, though they usually cross it transversely from one ditch to another. That night, a few cars passed, sweeping the fields with their headlights, traveling in a little globe of light visible from quite a distance across the flat landscape.

I saw stars, though not as many as I had hoped. The glow of Codogno behind me and the streetlights along the autostrada cast an often-overlooked pollution into the sky. The cloud ribbons above looked almost like dull versions of the Northern Lights, and I thought of a friend in Alaska who is probably a loosescrew bodhisattva. I thought also of a mountain ridgeline east of Seattle in the North Cascades.

Gazing up at a starry sky reminds me of Frost again and another thing I feel to be true: we need wilderness. In his famous letter in defense of wilderness, Wallace Stegner quoted the writer Sherwood Anderson, “I can remember old fellows in my home town speaking feelingly of an evening spent on the big empty plains. It had taken the shrillness out of them. They had learned the trick of quiet...." The rectilinear farms around Codogno do not have much directly in common with big empty plains or the great tracts of wilderness in the west of the United States. This part of Lombardy feels much more like Kansas than Vermont or Oregon, but, as for Stegner, the idea that wild areas exist is some consolation to me.

People have been living in the area around Codogno for over 2500 years, but the fields at night feel at least one step closer to wild than my balcony above the street. These fields, as well as the bici vecchia culture, have lessons on the trick of quiet. Hope you’re finding some in your nape of the way as well.