Nosing around

The North Country is pretty easy on the eyes these days: lilacs, apple blossoms, trillium, new leaves, tender grass, lots of sun. We take the world in first through the eyes, so much so that the interrogative "See?" is synonymous with "Do you understand?" Nature may have shorted humans in other ways, but a big chunk of our big brain is dedicated to sight. If we were dogs, we'd be gaze hounds. But the brain is an onion--peel away the primate and find the mammal, peel away that and find the reptile, deep within the secret core of us. That part of the brain is only interested in the eyes if they show a fast-moving object, prompting us to hotfoot across the intersection, or shriek at the 3D horror movie dagger. The lambent pastels of spring are wasted on it.

The ancient brain "sees" instead through the nose, which wraps mysteriously around the limbic chemical pumps of our emotions, triggering cascades of long lost memory and association. Compare the impact of watching someone outside the window mow the lawn with the experience of walking out into the sharp-scented grassy air. It recalls to mind every warm day since you were a child. Last weekend, I had the happy occasion to be in the rare book room of the Strand Bookstore in New York City with my daughter Elena. She turned to me and said "It smells like your Dad." I took a deep breath to "see" what she meant and there it was: all the generations the old books in the stacks had steeped in pipe smoke in the libraries of bookish men, still seeping back out decades later into the environmentally-regulated air. His dimming face comes sharp in the mind's eye once more. I see him turning the pages even now. The smell of aftershave.

Until telepathy

Poetry Month has come and gone again, and while I rarely take time out to talk like a pirate on National Talk Like A Pirate Day, I have taken time in the last month to give a few poetry readings and to attend a few readings, to buy and to sell a few books of poetry--and to read them--as opposed to stacking them on my nightstand. It's a curious business, much out of fashion, an eccentricity in myself that I rarely examine.

So it was with great interest that I listened to Jeffrey Brown's interview with poet Robert Hass on last night's PBS News Hour. His collection Time and Materials won this year's poetry Pulitzer--yes, there actually is one. The great lit major bull session questions--Why poetry? What is it good for?--are things he has examined in some depth. There is a line in his poem "The Problem of Describing Trees:"

There are limits to saying, in language, what the tree did.

This prompted Brown to question: "Why the need to describe trees?" Hass parried with a quote from environmentalist Ed Wilson: "Every species lives within its own sensory world." We can't say what the tree actually did; we can only say what we saw. The exercise is not to describe the tree, but to record "our memory of the gift of life," to say "here is what it was like for me to be alive." Or to quote another poet, Brett Duffany, "Until telepathy, poetry."

Postmodern Situation Room

My brain, alas, is slightly pre-postmodern, and discombobulates when frames of reference become too tightly intertwined. Take the fake news—The Daily Show from Tuesday--CSPAN shows a congressman objecting to calling a group of senior Bush advisors “the Vulcans” because, given what he sees as their truculence and deficiency in logic, they should instead be called “the Klingons.” News of a sort. The Daily Show picks it up and calls the nearest thing to a Vulcan, Spock portrayer Leonard Nimoy, for comment. Another Trek veteran, George Takei interrupts. So we have policy examined via fantasy, reported as news, rendered as satire, given context by actors reprising their fantasy roles. Small wonder that modern newsrooms all appear to be modeled on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise (the set of the bridge, that is). In the next half hour we find that fake conservative talk host Stephen Colbert will have real conservative talk host Bill O’Reilly (who was the mold from which Colbert was struck) as his guest, and that Colbert will also appear on O’Reilly’s show. A double-dittoheader.

Looking for relief from the media mirrorball, I fire up my office radio today for On Point, only to find an hour-long look at anti-terrorism policy as colored by the Fox thriller series, 24. The superhuman antics of Agent Jack Bauer are contrasted with actual ops, and an alarming number of real anti-terrorism types declare their fandom—Yikes!

Mostly I like to think “What is reality?” is a rhetorical question. But apparently, this is a fantasy I can no longer afford. The “point of contemplation” in my yoga class this week concerned how the body can experience that which has never happened to it, solely through the impact of our thinking. In a sense we become, therefore, what we watch. At the moment, I am sore all over.