Readers' Comments

in newspapers are, I find, generally not readable. Even when the essay writer is a scholar/scientist, seemingly ordinary people feel free to argue against facts. Only because I know the writer did I read some of the comment in response to David Haskell's "The Seasons Aren't What They Used to Be" published in the New York Times.

Not all of them, mind you, because a few readers troll so freely and so illogically that I grow itchy to beat a fast exit. For example, "Expatico" wrote this:

Haskell asks, "Why do we not act?" Because, Mr. Haskell, we like our cars, our central heating, our big-box stores, refrigeration, electricity, airplane travel, modern medicine, television and iPhones much more than the prospect of returning to subsistence farming. Because the promise of "green energy," which I've been hearing about for four decades, remains but a figment of the Left's religious imagination. Because "sustainable agriculture" would only produce a fraction of what "fossil-fuel enhanced" agriculture can generate, thanks to fertilizers, pesticides and labor-saving machinery, so hundreds of millions of people, if not billions, would starve to death. Because human beings, whether in India or China, are hard-wired to acquire more, not less, and will happily mouth environmental platitudes while buying yet another big-screen television. Because, Mr. Haskell, nobody wants to go back to pre-Industrial civilization. 

Do you?

I confess that I am a bit cheeky or snarky myself, but honestly -- I can't help wondering why some folks even read the papers. Is it simply to express anger? Or make a smart retort? Or get their names/pseudonyms in print?

I suppose Expatico would question even the expertise of this 16-year-old and her Australian Shepherd, whom she has trained:

No Jokes!

I am the center of the universe.

So are you.

I always thought this when I was a child and a teenager, but college and life convinced me otherwise.

But having read the New York Times wonderful "A Week of Misconceptions," I find it oddly comforting to know that I was right after all. (Apparently, lots of other folks wonder stuff, and the NYT listens.)

And about Twilight Zone, too, as it turns out. Although the show scared the child in me, the adult I became thought it ridiculous, because the future can't happen until I'm in it. If I'm not in it, it isn't.

Think about it.

I have.

You might, too, after you read this special section.

If Only I, a Reformed Bug Smusher (for the most part), Were This Clever

On Smushing Bugs by Tim Kreider
The New York Times, 17 November 2014

When my kitchen became infested with ants this summer, as it does every year, I put out ant traps, which, in another annual rite, did exactly nothing. So I did what I always end up doing — inefficiently smushing the ants one by one. Sometimes I’ll massacre dozens at a time in a fit of pique after catching them glutting themselves in my sugar bowl, but then, seeing a single ant moping around on the counter looking sort of forlorn and hangdog, I’ll hesitate. He looks like maybe he’s not having such a great day already. Getting smushed is the last thing this guy needs.

Dispensing death and clemency capriciously — killing on petulant impulse, granting pardons at whim — gives me an Olympian view of how men must live and die in battle or disasters: one just unlucky, in the wrong place at the wrong moment, while the guy next to him is miraculously spared for no reason at all. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.

Ants, as individuals, do not seem like very complicated animals to me (I’m sure E. O. Wilson would correct me), but every time I smush one I am aware I am extinguishing for all eternity one being’s single chance to be alive. It’s hard to believe Descartes convinced even himself that animals were automata; watching an ant scramble frantically to escape my annihilating thumb, he certainly looks every bit as conscious of his own mortality as I am.Dispensing death and clemency capriciously — killing on petulant impulse, granting pardons at whim — gives me an Olympian view of how men must live and die in battle or disasters: one just unlucky, in the wrong place at the wrong moment, while the guy next to him is miraculously spared for no reason at all. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.

Living in a cabin in the country in the summer, I end up having to kill a lot of things. In this, as in so much else, my 16-year-old self would be disappointed in me. At that age I thought maybe Jainism was the religion for me. All I really knew about the Jains was that they carried little brooms with them everywhere to sweep insects out of their paths, lest they accidentally step on a single bug. As a kid who used to spend most of his time at pools rescuing flailing beetles from drowning, this appealed to me.

I note that Jainism originated in India, a country to which stinkbugs are not indigenous. The stinkbug, an invasive species, has taken over the Mid-Atlantic region, including my house, in the last few years as swiftly as the Martians conquered England. It was from stinkbugs that I learned that any animal in sufficient numbers, no matter how harmless, can be horrific. An effective stinkbug trap can be constructed out of a two-liter soda bottle and an L.E.D., but I find it more thorough and meditative to eradicate them through piecework, using the nozzle attachment of my vacuum cleaner. They make a very satisfying thhhhhP! sound when you suck them up. They then get to live out the rest of their lives in the oubliette of the vacuum bag. So my compassion is not quite Buddha-like in its embrace.

Mice are a stickier moral problem. Mice are mammals, and, it has to be admitted when you look at them in the light of day, cute — little bright-eyed wriggly creatures. You can see why they make such endearing cartoon characters. In an ideal world I would be content to coexist with mice. But my Gandhi-esque live-and-let-live attitude hardens into a more Fleming-McCartneyesque one when I go to enjoy my first cup of coffee of the day and find a tiny, hardened black turd in my mug. It is then that I set about carefully daubing the trigger of a mousetrap with peanut butter. So begins a wearisome cycle of vengeance and remorse.

A traditional mousetrap is designed to function like a guillotine, killing instantly and painlessly, but human technology is imperfect. Having to dispose of the limp corpse of a mouse first thing in the morning is a depressing chore with which to begin the day, but God forbid you should find the mouse alive, bleeding, maimed and crying on your kitchen counter. Now what? Mercy-smush the mouse with a rock? Put it outside and hope it’ll recover? It will die of sepsis under your porch. Whatever you do, you are going to feel like John Wayne Gacy for days. These days I use clever balance-activated traps that harmlessly capture the mouse. Whenever I catch one I carry the trap out to the car, place it on the passenger seat, and drive the mouse up the road to let it out near the house of my neighbor Gene, who likes animals.

I feel guilty about this killing to varying degrees, ranging from not one bit (mosquitoes, horseflies) to sorta (ants, stinkbugs) to gut-clenching remorse (the mice, the mice). The cartoonist Ruben Bolling once drew a handy chart explaining the ethical hierarchy of living things, from close relatives to plants, rating each in categories from Should You Help It? to Can You Eat It?. Some of these biases are based on help versus harm — cats and dogs are our pals and protectors, snakes and mosquitoes can kill us — but some are irrational prejudice. It is my official policy never to kill spiders, even though occasionally a large hairy one drops out of the rafters right onto the back of my hand and I must walk swiftly to the door holding my hand as far away from me as it will get mentally reciting Fear is the mind-killer, fear is the mind-killer. My rationale is: Spiders eat insects, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It’s a little like arming the mujahedeen, but as far as I’m concerned mosquitoes and stinkbugs are the Soviet Union, and there’s a war on. Also, anyone who’s read “Huck Finn” knows that killing spiders is bad luck.

It’s impossible even to live and move through this world without killing something. Not long ago I stepped out in my lawn and felt something squish under my heel. Inside my slipper I found the body of a daddy longlegs, an animal of which I am rather fond, its attached legs still twitching. Just driving the 10 minutes to the library and back, I wince as I smush butterflies when I fail to brake in time to whip them into the slipstream, or, worse, the occasional lightning bug, whose splattered magical guts leave a fluorescing greenish-gold smear of stars across my windshield that I then have to watch go heartbreakingly dark. Once I struck an indigo bunting who’d been sitting in the road — I didn’t see him in time and he couldn’t fly out of the way of my grille. I stopped and got out and stood watching him dying in the grass, slowly spreading his wings, iridescent under the sun. I helplessly kill dozens, if not hundreds, of animals daily with my big, dumb, blundering existence.I feel guilty about this killing to varying degrees, ranging from not one bit (mosquitoes, horseflies) to sorta (ants, stinkbugs) to gut-clenching remorse (the mice, the mice). The cartoonist Ruben Bolling once drew a handy chart explaining the ethical hierarchy of living things, from close relatives to plants, rating each in categories from Should You Help It? to Can You Eat It?. Some of these biases are based on help versus harm — cats and dogs are our pals and protectors, snakes and mosquitoes can kill us — but some are irrational prejudice. It is my official policy never to kill spiders, even though occasionally a large hairy one drops out of the rafters right onto the back of my hand and I must walk swiftly to the door holding my hand as far away from me as it will get mentally reciting Fear is the mind-killer, fear is the mind-killer. My rationale is: Spiders eat insects, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It’s a little like arming the mujahedeen, but as far as I’m concerned mosquitoes and stinkbugs are the Soviet Union, and there’s a war on. Also, anyone who’s read “Huck Finn” knows that killing spiders is bad luck.

It’s fastidious and silly in this culture, kind of sissyish, to confess to feeling bad about smushing bugs. As far as most of us are concerned, bugs are household dirt that moves. I recently read an article about the survivors of an earthquake in the Tibetan city of Yushu that killed 3,000 people saving thousands of near-microscopic crustaceans from the mud, as an act of devotion. This may seem to Westerners like a trivial ritual, a waste of time, but it is, at least, more real than posting condolences on Facebook or applying a custom R.I.P. decal to your car’s rear window. A bug may be a small, unimportant thing, but maybe killing or saving one isn’t. Every time I smush a bug I can feel myself smushing something else, too — an impulse toward mercy, a little throb of remorse. Maybe it would feel better to decide that killing even a bug matters. Does devaluing tiny insignificant lives have some effect whereby we become more callous about larger, more important ones, like a karmic broken-window theory? People running for cover on the ground must look antlike from a bomber or a drone. As flies to wanton boys.

This summer I drove a bag of garbage that was attracting fruit flies (kill en masse without qualm) down to the Dumpster at the end of my dirt road. I went to lift up the heavy lid of the Dumpster, and what did I find in there but two miserable-looking raccoons huddled together in the corner, hiding their faces from the light. They couldn’t have been in there for too long, or they would’ve roasted to death in the summer heat wave. At least they weren’t going hungry — the floor of the Dumpster was covered in denuded corncobs, squashed watermelon rinds and other amuse-bouches of filth. Still, they must’ve had a bad night of it in there; they looked scrawny and matted and sad.

What I had here was a Situation. I put down my bag of garbage and turned off the car. I trotted off to a shed where I found just what was needed — a piece of lumber about six feet long. Raccoons may not grasp the concept of favors or gratitude but they instantly grasped the concept of the ramp — I hadn’t even lowered it to the Dumpster’s floor before one of them reached up and grabbed it with his paws. (They’re extremely clever, dexterous animals — I do not doubt they will be the next species to set paw on the moon if we successfully exterminate ourselves.) I set the board down and backed off fast. They both clambered up it, crawled across the Dumpster’s rim, plopped to the ground and slunk off into the woods whence they’d come — to rehydrate, debrief or generally recollect their dignity. See? I thought. I am a good person. I am helping.This summer I drove a bag of garbage that was attracting fruit flies (kill en masse without qualm) down to the Dumpster at the end of my dirt road. I went to lift up the heavy lid of the Dumpster, and what did I find in there but two miserable-looking raccoons huddled together in the corner, hiding their faces from the light. They couldn’t have been in there for too long, or they would’ve roasted to death in the summer heat wave. At least they weren’t going hungry — the floor of the Dumpster was covered in denuded corncobs, squashed watermelon rinds and other amuse-bouches of filth. Still, they must’ve had a bad night of it in there; they looked scrawny and matted and sad.

When I told this story to my neighbor Gene, who puts bowls of meat out for the local vultures, he told me he lets those same raccoons out of the Dumpster once a week or so. So O.K., maybe they’re not all that smart after all. And maybe I am not a hero in the raccoon community. But whenever I think of all the harm I’ve done in this world, through cruelty or carelessness, or just by the unavoidable crime of being in it, I try to remember how I felt standing there, watching them go.

Odonate rescue, one of many

In the Here and Now

In today's New York Times, Perry Garfinkel describes opening a writing workshop with this direction:

At the top of a page, write the words ‘Here and now I am’ followed by an ellipsis. In the next five minutes write as many sentences as you can, each sentence beginning with ‘Here and now I am.’ The rules: no questions, no stopping, no thinking, no worries about logic or syntax and no cheating off your neighbor.

If you go blank, draw from your senses — what you see, smell, taste, hear, feel.

Here goes:

Here and now I am writing my 2,120th post for My Daily Snap, a ritual that lifts me like a swing, higher and higher, head back, laughing. 

Here and now I remember swinging as a child, and I love blogging like that, an infectious addiction, even though my feet hurt. 

Here and now, my feet hurt as they have since morning when, over my head a green heron ack-ack-acking across the pond, I slid part-way into the black loam, water soaking my socks, my camera aimed at another new species -- the Southern Spreadwing. 

Here and now, I smile, knowing that a famous person, Dennis Paulson, author of a major field guide to Odonates in America, verified my photo on Facebook. 

Here and now, I heard the heron's acking as applause, but it's the rush of wings, the gust of air brushing my cheek as a Slaty Skimmer races by, that makes my skin pucker. 

Here and now I feel dehydrated, not literally, but metaphorically: spent, I suppose. 

Here and now, still tired from looking for bugs, in wet shoes and socks, two cameras slung across my chest and back, I know I'll do it again tomorrow. 

Here and now, when I write have nothing to say of consequence other than noting the way the Southern Spreadwing turned a moment toward me as I reached in for a photograph or the way the second lizard, the one on the Lake Dimmick sign, waited and waited and waited as I approached, as if it knew I am no predator. 

Here and now, I have nothing to write, I think, but then when I sit at the computer and place my fingers on the keyboard, something happens and text appears. 

In the here and now of photowalking and writing I am part of the elements, and I feel whole.

Three Beautiful Things: Dylan Thomas, Hyacinths, Congressman John Lewis and Happy

(inspired by Clare Law's blog found here)

1.  My first poet love, Dylan Thomas, features in today's New York Times in a beautiful article by Ondine Cohane. Like her, I discovered Thomas's poetry in high school. I listened to his voice recordings and read the poems over and over and over again the way some teens today obsess over a song or musical artist. In my junior year, I won the school's poetry contest (think oral interpretation) with "Fern Hill," and those beautiful lines still, all these years later, come quickly to my tongue and mind.

2.  The hyacinths in Abbo's Alley unfold slowly from bud to olive-cream to blue-purple flower, and with them I celebrate the coming of that season that reminds me of the generous fecundity of the world in which I am but a small part. I lay on the "fields of praise" this morning, snapping again and again and again only for the joy of looking.

3.  In my youth, racist terrorists tried to kill Congressman John Lewis, then a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activist dedicated to winning civil rights for all those living in the country he calls "The Beloved Community." A hero. A true American hero. A fellow native Alabamian, a man with dignity and faith in our better selves and commitment to doing good, no matter the cost, and joy in living. He dances. He is happy, and he makes me happy. 

Beautiful Things

I

My niece, a floral designer, makes beautiful things beautiful anew through selection, arrangement, and display. A skill, an art, a calling, of a kind, to make herself and others happy. I admire her dedication to making an environment beautiful, no matter how prosaic and small or grand and large. She brings the natural to attention, making others attend to what she loves.

II

Hanging on my study wall, over and behind my left shoulder, a Jim Sudduth painting glows. Although many would call it crude or untutored, -- the product of an untrained painter or dabbler -- mud and housepaint, brush and finger marks and pencil create an addictive vibration of life and liveliness, wedding earth, hand and eye. Whoever dismisses the painting as "naive" does not appreciate artful creation.

III

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity" brings together paintings and objects of fashionable daily life -- men's hats, women's corsets and bustles, designer dresses. In her New York Times review, Roberta Smith writes, "A result is an intense, almost hallucinatory swirl in which art and artifact continually change places, and a basic wisdom is demonstrated: any well-selected thing can illuminate any other."

IV

I love the basic wisdom of well-selected things and the people wise enough to love them.

Followed By This

If you don't like the weather now, stick around for an hour or so.  It'll change.

And it did.

Today, clear sky and full sun brought many of us up and out.

By the time I made my way round the lake, the red-hatted reader had been joined by two women, another man, and two children, all of them making the most of light's promise.

Afterwards, at home, I read the New York Times article "Reflections," a luminous article on illumination in artworks to accompany us as we "turn a corner on the season of long nights and short days."

Indoors and out, I say let light shine.