Mr. Wilson's Arboretum

December 28, 2002

Christmas?

So I sit here on Christmas morning, trying to understand what it’s like to have been born, and I listen to Christmas music, because this is its season, and you really can’t listen to it any other time of the year. Many of the Christmas songs are folk songs, such as I’ve talked about recently. This year I keep coming back to the Cherry Tree Carol. It’s based on apocryphal tradition, and certainly doesn’t match any Biblical accounts, but it concerns the Virgin’s pregnancy, and it’s popularly sung as a Christmas carol.

It must be the cherries; the blood red fruit.
Or maybe it’s all this talk and song of being born, but I can’t help thinking back to Spring, and that Riddle Song, the one with the cherry without any stone.
And I’m thinking there might be another answer to that riddle.

A Riddle is a little model we make of the Mystery.
Just as Mystery is inexhaustible, a Riddle may have more than one correct answer.
Just as thinking back to Spring is now thinking forward to Spring.
But right now it’s Christmas, and I present you with a Holiday Triad of Riddles:

Who is as a Cherry without any Stone?
Who is Child and Parent at once?
Who is Born with the Reborn Sun?

December 24, 2002

Descended From a Miracle

It happens that Christmas Eve is my birthday. People often assume that’s a problem, that my “special day” gets lost in the seasonal surge. On the contrary, I’ve always enjoyed the association. It seems to me I get more attention, rather than less, owing to the general concentration of celebration.

Anyone’s birthday is a special day, at least to them. Mine is caught up in our biggest Holiday, replete with images and evocations of nativity. Christmas is a heady occasion, no doubt, but I’ve come to realize that I can’t really separate it from my own birthday. I suppose that some part of what I understand as the “Holiday Spirit” is actually what other people feel on their birthdays, whenever they occur. Allowing us to identify with divinity is a proper function of Christmas, but for most of the year we are merely born, in the conventional manner.
Such as that may be.

We know our parents, and who their parents were, but beyond that it’s hearsay fading to ignorance. Surely the line had a beginning? There was a time before there were people, and a time before there was life. Perhaps there was a time before there was anything, if you can call that time. Even the most mundane explanation of how it is that we are here now passes for miraculous. Somewhere in our ancestry we require that there be something out of nothing.

Something out of nothing is a Mystery.
Hence Christmas, with it’s unaccountable Birth.
But mine, and yours, are no less miraculous.
And that, too, is the lesson of Christmas.
It’s everybody’s Birthday.

December 21, 2002

Solstice is here...

December 16, 2002

Bellwether

Who has not had a song in their head?
Often in my wanderings, hectic thought subsides and music fills my mind's ear. A popular tune of the day, perhaps, or even some commercial jingle, finding a subconscious route to taunt me. But mostly I hear the old songs, the so-called folk songs, into which our ancestors once poured their wisdom.

I have at times had recourse to these songs here on this page.
They are useful in making certain points, for they contain the very power of Tradition. Their power is accessed through intimacy, through memorization and recitation, be it aloud or in the silent realms of the mind. Some we sing during the Christmas season, of which there will be more to say, but today the song that haunts me will return us to the events of late October, and the rally held in the Park which I mentioned back on Veteran's Day.

What alerted me to the anti-war protest of that day was an unexpected echo of song, not in my head, but drifting across the meadows and up to the Great Hill. Only noise I heard at first, the clamor of a crowd, but then something familiar, not fully intelligible, yet fitting into a well-worn psychic pathway leading to recognition. It was The False Knight on the Road, or so I thought; Child Ballad number three. In fact, it was a modern rewrite, but the pattern and the chorus were the same, and it was the chorus that I finally recognized:

And he stood, and he stood
It was well that he stood...

The song tells of a schoolboy confronting a mysterious "False Knight", who bars the child's path. The knight asks a series of taunting questions, but the steadfast boy has a riposte for each, standing firm, until the Knight is finally dismissed to hell.

To stand firm, to stand against.
A picture of resistance, drawn in song.
I suspect it's through this image that the song appeals to the war resistors, but it's not so much the standing against that interests me as it is the going through.

The False Knight is a very old song, and it's been rewritten before now, but it was once a magical song of initiation. It has been Christianized, and marked by Authority, which perhaps makes it a problematic candidate for a protest song.

It still bears the basic form of the Initiate facing the Guardian, who must be properly addressed before granting access to the Mysteries. This model of spiritual development has not yet been superseded, but in the song the seeker has been reduced to a child, in need of schooling, that is to say, codified learning, rather than the ecstatic understanding of the Mysteries. The Knight is often identified with the Devil. Rather than guarding a spiritual threshold, he tries to keep the boy from getting to school. The school bell that banishes the Knight was once a church bell. They ring with the same Authority, but the imagery has been diminished.

Even so, there is some magic left. The boy vanquishes the Knight by topping every question with a clever answer. The verbal fencing seems rather mild by satanic standards, but that's because originally the Guardian was not truly evil, but rather a manifestation of the resistance which all Life must pass through. The topping contest exists in many cultures, often as a child's game, but it's also closely related to the riddle sequences I alluded to last Spring. The False Knight lacks the wit of Captain Wedderburn's Courtship, or the poetry of Scarborough Fair, but what it really lacks is Love. In those songs the proper answer to the riddle dissipates resistance, winning the acquiescence of the beloved. In The False Knight, the reward for defeating the Devil is to submit to the teachings of books, and the authority of the bell.
Which perhaps makes it a suitable platform for the political after all.

The real lesson is in the riddling and the ripostes, the verbal inversions of expectation, which cause the mind to gape and rhyme, and open itself to possibilities that are not taught in school. It may come as a question; it may come as an answer; it may be a playground comebacker, but the logic is ecstatic, and it teaches us to overcome our own resistance. This we can only do by passing through, not by standing against.

Knowledge thus won is true Gnosis. It marks the point on our road where self-knowledge meets knowledge of the World at large. That meeting is ever humbling, but if it teaches us to move beyond self-righteousness it will be a worthwhile lesson, not least in the worldly realm of the political. If we can get past our habit of seeing the Devil in all those who disagree with us, if we can admit that we are not so innocent as children, then we will have cause to ring the bells of celebration.

November 28, 2002

Happy Thanksgiving (from Austria)...

November 11, 2002

Inveterate

After the terrorist attack on lower Manhattan, I think it's fair to say that all of us New Yorkers are veterans of a sort. I might have said as much beforehand, and without limitation, as we are all surely veterans of Life, and it galls me to grant privileged status to war and its wagers. Still, we have been touched more deeply hereabouts, and people who would never wield a weapon have been battered as much as any combatants. Even those who seek sanctuary in the Park bear reminders of our recent unnatural history.

The horror of war is one thing, ("honoring" veterans is, in part, a way of dispensing with our complicity in that horror,) and maybe those of us who did not lose life or limb shouldn't presume to claim any measure of equivalence. I certainly wouldn't for myself, but I can't help but contemplate the psychic fallout that must have hit another birder I encounter with some regularity in the Park. Rebekah Creshkoff has gone beyond birdwatching as a sport. She’s deeply involved with the plight of our native species, to the point of becoming an activist on their behalf. One of her main concerns has been the problem of tower kills, where huge numbers of migrating birds die colliding with tall buildings or communications towers, usually in bad weather. It was her practice to arrive early at the World Trade Center and collect the victims on such occasions, nursing the few survivors, cataloging the rest, and sending their corpses off for the consideration of scientists. That those towers should be the scene of human carnage on a comparable scale, even as the hazard they represented became a casualty of the same event, beggars my powers of comprehension and emotional response.
But that’s what war does to people.

So Rebekah is certainly a veteran, and I’m happy to honor her, but I think even she was a little surprised at my failure to endorse another sort of slaughter, that of the Brown-headed Cowbird. Well-meaning conservationists are waging war against the Cowbird. It's a native bird, not an invasive, but it has the unpleasant habit of laying its eggs in other species' nests, earning it the rank of parasite. The host birds raise the Cowbird chicks, to the detriment of their own, and the Cowbird is considered an important factor in the decline of many songbird species. In Michigan, where the endangered Kirtland's Warbler has its limited nesting range, Cowbird control programs are part of the strategy for saving the species. Of course, "control" means "killing". I'm always suspicious of euphemisms, just as I'm suspicious of any solution which involves defining some group as the enemy, with the suggestion that if we just kill the bad guys everything will be all right. It seems to me that this is how war and terror typically proceed.

I don't pretend to have the answers, for birds or for people, but I do have misgivings about institutionalized killing, even when it may be justifiable. I suppose that it is a sort of natural law that when someone tries to kill you, you are thereby justified in killing them, but the purported Christian heritage of the West once taught something different. "Turn the other cheek" and "love thy enemy" were revolutionary ideas in their time, but they derived from the faith, hope, and love of the powerless. Once Christianity ascended to power such ideals were jettisoned in a betrayal of faith and tradition which continues to this day, at least insofar as our culture claims to represent Christian values.

That being the case, I went down to Washington, trying to stop the impending war.
I am not much given to such activism, being essentially apolitical. My position is the ascetic one of the observer; the outsider. It's hardly tenable, but it's where I have been forced. An outsider I was, on the day in October when an anti-war rally was mounted in Central Park. Traversing the Great Hill, I began to hear distant sounds from a crowd on the East Meadow, but it took a while to realize what was going on, and I didn't know until later that friends of mine had been there. It was those friends that made the difference to me between action and inaction. I found myself feeling bad, not for my own lack of commitment, but because I wanted to join in their commitment; my pain was that of exclusion, rather than moral failure. Yet that is the way of any mass-effort: many are enlisted more by the momentum than the meaning.

We learn from our friends, and sometimes peer pressure can lead us where we need to go, but it's also a microcosm of mob psychology. Writ large, the like-minded assembly comes to resemble the very thing we would oppose: an army focused on a foe. It's to the credit of my associates that they recognized this, and out of their struggle with the means and aims of protestation came the notion of a high-spirited contingent, more like a rock band than a band of soldiers, libidinous and ecstatic, defying the dogma of politics. The amount of effort and planning it took to manifest such a group, and get them to DC, may have belied the image we created, but it was worthwhile, I think, even to march in a circle around the disinterested seat of power. At least the warmongers must make the effort to ignore us.

I have some memory of the Vietnam era protests; I even participated in a couple, in the company of my parents. They were hardly radicals, but resistance then was more advanced than today. For my part, I was a would-be hippie, making an adolescent gesture towards something larger than my understanding. In my mind hippies, radicals, and anti-establishment types of all stripes were conflated in their common rejection of mainstream politics. Being against the war was “cool”, even to a twelve year old, but it took years, and thousands of dead to make it so.

I hope we don’t have to go through that again, but war is always about repeating a mistake, and the years bring as much forgetfulness as learning. We have forgotten much of what we learned in the 60’s, leaving us to grapple with many of the same issues. I now have a better understanding of the gap between the true hippies, who were quasi-spiritual dropouts, and the radical activists, who were political strategists seeking allies. They shared a disgust with the war, but the hippies weren’t much for the party discipline of the organized activists. They were for the other kind of party, and they brought a subversive theatricality to the act of protest, threatening not only to the establishment, but to that form of resistance which only mirrors the object of its enmity. If the last quarter of a century has not done much to advance the dialogue, we will just have to take it up again. At least that’s my understanding of how I ended up a middle aged protester. “Make love, not war” is no more ridiculous than “love thy enemy”. And if war seems sensible to people, then we’re much in need of a dose of the ridiculous. What we don’t need is more veterans.

October 31, 2002

Hallow It All

Tonight we welcome frightful dark
We relish our own fear
We fear that life is all too drab
So let the dead appear

Yet what are we but dead to be
Will we be braver then
Or hope to hide a quaking heart
Behind a skeleton?

We hallow Halloween with fear
For what we must become
But waking dawn will soon reveal
That trick and treat are one

(Oh, one other thing…)

October 14, 2002

No Vacancy

The Park is a caesura in the city; a pause for breath. A two and a half by one half mile gap, where the grid of Manhattan is not filled in; an aperture in the density of urban intensity.
But it is not a vacant lot.
There are vacant lots in the city, and, scale aside, the effect of a gap in the rectilinear mass is similar. Such lots may represent both decay and potential; the razing of the past and the promise of the future. In the meantime, they are dormant, but only in human terms. The emptiness of the Park has been aestheticised, sculpted and subsequently filled with specimens conventionally considered beautiful. Any untended expanse will also fill up, but if we do not love its contents we will continue to consider it essentially empty. The mean grasses and the plants we deign as weeds do not appeal, nor do they offer much resistance to our plans. Regardless, they appear wherever our attention wavers, or our purposes are stymied for a time. Then green things will grow, and animals appear, for Life occupies any place it can.

There is opportunity in vacancy.
Thinking about Columbus Day, I realize that the Europeans treated America as a vacant lot. It was an opportunity, to be cleared and built upon; its plants and animals and even people were merely squatters who should scatter at our coming, or be plowed under. The price of such wantonness is to be alienated from the very Land that sustains us, and therefore to suffer a great nostalgia for what we have lost. I learn this lesson each October as the Wildflower Meadow goes to seed.

The Meadow is a small but significant patch of the Park in which the effect of a vacant lot has been intentionally created, in the interest of encouraging wildlife. A transitional habitat, overgrown and unruly amid the careful landscaping of a lost Victorian America.
Artfully we have planted what once the wind could sew.
But even if we cannot fully recapture our vanished wildness, we may mark in the idea of the Meadow the turning back point of Columbus’ voyage; Santa Maria coming about among the Asters and the Sparrows in a sea of dying grass.

A walk through a vacant lot remains a voyage of discovery.
In truth, the Meadow is as dense as the City, thick with Primrose and Pokeweed, Grape and Pea, Milkweed and Goldenrods and Daises of many kinds. Somewhere in between these I’ve managed to spy, a couple of times, the Yellow-breasted Chat. It’s considered a good bird, for although it’s the largest of our Warblers it’s notoriously secretive, and none too common, either. Seeing one might be the highlight of an intensive day of birding in the Park, so imagine my surprise when one popped up a few feet in front of me, not in the hyper-real habitat of the Meadow, but in a vacant lot in Queens, across the street from the diner where I was having breakfast. The Chat, migrating on a rainy night, needed a place to land and refuel, and that little spot of green was good enough.
There is opportunity in vacancy.

I must confess to my own nostalgic fondness for vacant lots. Indeed, it comes to me that my relationship with Central Park is much the same as I had one childhood Summer when I daily walked the two long blocks to a vacant lot at the end of our street, where I spent hours hunting for butterflies and spiders. That was thirty seven years ago, and I soon moved on, to superheros, to baseball, and then to adolescence, but among all the passing passions of youth I still recall it as one of my favorite Summers. I no longer imprison spiders in jars, or stick pins through butterflies, being (perhaps) a little wiser than a child, but I still find the living things in the corners of our World just as compelling as ever.
I see no vacancy in the empty places.

Vacancy or Plenitude.
It may be a matter of interpretation.
For the Chat, it’s the difference between life and death, but the bird’s interpretation reverses ours. Chats have seen their world diminish. Caught in the vacancy of the City, they must look for those few green gaps that allow at least the possibility of their continued existence. The rest is all necropolis.

For us, everything pivots upon the realization that every vacant lot could be a meadow, and a meadow is something to treasure, to plant if necessary, but not to build over. When we have learned to plant as much as we destroy, and sometimes to merely leave well enough alone, then we will have sent Columbus sailing Home, with a flight of Chats trailing off his windward bow.

September 23, 2002

Rising to the Occasion of Fall

Summer is spent, but what has it left us for Fall?
To put a tortured year behind us, in favor of a tortuous future?
Nature’s indifference to our affairs is one of its corrective virtues, but the Land is not unaffected by our actions.
At least we will project our guilt upon its suffering.
The drought persists, infecting Autumn’s prospects. Stressed trees drop early leaves, and promise a scant harvest. Fall is a season of beauty, revealed beneath the Summer’s retreat, but it’s typically a dry time, so we must hope for Winter snows to salve the coming year.

In the meantime, things die, like the grasses; or bloom, like Goldenrods; or go to seed, like Sunflowers; or just go away, like the migrant birds now passing through. Change and repetition, all mixed up in the most multifaceted of seasons.

At twelve hours of day, and twelve of night, the Year is balanced.
Darkness may outpace the day now, but there is much to be seen, while the light lasts. A furtive Cuckoo, or a bold Blackburnian Warbler, flickering through the Meadow; Jewel Weed along the Loch, where the insect thrum mingles with the liquid voice of the stream; butterflies decorating the flowers that decorate the Conservatory Garden.
To know these things seems to me a good harvest.

A harvest of necessity.
I have maintained, on this page, that such engagement is in fact corrective, rather than escapist. We cannot escape our ties to Nature, any more than we can escape ourselves. Sometimes I want to escape from other people, but there is reassurance in finding how many of them are similarly motivated.

A year after last September’s terror and disaster, I met a woman who’d found healing through immersion in birding. We all need healing, if only from the basic trauma of existing. Birds can help, but people need to help each other. I sometimes feel that I should be more helpful and less insular, so it pleased me to be able to point out a few birds for this neophyte, including a rare Connecticut Warbler. Passing along something of what I’ve learned in my own endeavor has a way of validating the effort; laying healing upon healing; a gratification which cannot be had in the solitary precincts of meditation.
Her joy was palpable, and that made me feel good.

So, though Autumn brings decline, the cycle of the Year still offers hope. Healing comes from wholeness, just as our pain comes from separation. Each bird we learn is the answer to a want; each change of season completes the cycle once again; each point of contact holds the World intact.

older posts...

The Fourth Day of Christmas

The Third Day of Christmas

The Second Day of Christmas