Fragments From Floyd

We’re watching “Beyond the Blue”–the musicalized version of Bobby Darin’s (Walden Robert Cassotto’s) life story. Kevin Spacey does a darn good job of singing–not lip-syncing–Darin’s best known (and some lesser known) tunes.

Not surprisingly, the movie opens with the syncopated opening bars of what most people these days would immediately recognize as “Mack the Knife.”

And yet, as I listened, it came to me that I remembered this same melody, slowed by half and played in a melancholy stranger-in-the-rain sort of way. I had known this tune very early, before age six maybe, and only now had those remnant memories resonated with Darin’s 1959 rendition. I was 11.

The song was written for the Three Penny Opera (1928) with lyrics by Bertold Brecht–though not exactly today’s lyrics, and no doubt, at least in the German to English translation, it never would have made it to the top of the charts.

Turns out, it reached the American public first by way of Louis Armstrong in 1954. That must be the version I’m remembering from farther back.

Here are a couple of stanzas from the original. Hardly makes you want to snap your fingers, eh?

Jenny Towler was found
With a knife in her chest
And on the wharf walks Mack the Knife,
Who knows nothing about all this.

And the minor-aged widow,
Whose name everyone knows,
Woke up and was violated
Mack, what was your price?

Romancing the camera

One final image, an abstraction of winter from one ephemeral half hour last week. It is this, and also it is for me a holographic fragment that holds all the information in the larger whole.

Wholeness. Will it ever exceed our grasp? The camera’s eye and memory and words are hands with which we grasp but cannot hold that larger Truth that speaks to some–but not all–in nature.

Are you a naturalist? Is there a regenerative and revelatory power in meadow or woods–cathedrals not made by hands, as John Muir would have it–that sustains and nurtures you?

And what do you think of the term “romantic” to capture the essence of the poetic versus the cold-objective term for those who wander and wonder in nature? Are you a Romantic Naturalist?

Join the discussion about the nature of naturalists at RomanticNaturalist.

And note the sidebar button to the Nature Blog Network. This list (I’m not included as I just added the script this morning) is likely to grow and morph over time. Consider this a site worth bookmarking.

Click for larger Image 

It was the striking sundog (or parhelion) that sent me scrambling inside for my camera. By the time I got back out, only a much lesser one persisted but I shot it anyway.

Inside on the monitor, it’s muted colors against the dark background pointed farther out, into Hubble’s deep space view of cosmic clouds of stellar dust. I morphed the image toward that interpretation, to remind me of the small and close that speaks of the larger and more distant realities always just beyond our hurried attention.

The microcosm reflects the macrocosm. Indeed.

Framing a single cloud gives no more comprehension of the sky than photographing a single wave can convey the vastness of the ocean. But it can remind, can point the way.

A single day, a whole lifetime, too–mere glimpses of eternity. We see a slice with every tick of the clock and should feel blessed or cursed that, among all creatures, we know.

I awake on these single digit mornings in this century-old house and don my winter-morning uniform, grumbling in the cold. Long johns, wool socks, heavy sweats, two shirts and a bathrobe. The house won’t hold heat to keep it more than 60 degrees inside when it’s 3 outside and the wind–even high over the ridges above us and not down where we live–still sucks the warmth through every unsealed joint and chink out into the night air.

What must it have been like a hundred years ago sitting on the side of a bed at 4 a.m. in this very room, no insulation in walls or attic whatsoever, thin rugs rippling on the floor as the wind blew through the stacked-rock foundation? The fireplaces–three of them–would have sucked more heat out than the dying morning embers added. It would have been well down into the 40s most likely. I’m sure you could see your breath while donning what clothes you might have had to bring some feeling back into cold feet and hands.

There were still coals left in the stove this morning; I’m making a point to select the high-heat wood from the stack, saving the all-night logs for just before bed, so rekindling will be easy the next morning without using up too much of the stuff that has to be split from the bigger pieces. My knee injury from a week ago today still hinders me from full duty at the woodpile.

The usual workday duty of scraping Ann’s windshield was a pleasant obligation today, the crescent moon’s dark 90% a visible shadow, a bright Venus (I’m thinking) not so far off to the east, both just above the treeline from the house, just below it as I stood there in the dark scraping frost. What a wonderful world. I should not have read the morning news first thing. Bad habit.

The creek is making that muffled winter sound whimpering from under the ice; wind in trees like reeds whistles away to the southeast. And I had thoughts of spring.

In April I will celebrate the second anniversary of my 30th birthday–an historic event which, at the time, hung heavy with the portent of passage from youth into the responsibilities of full adult life. Doubled now, another threshold looms. Near 60 and on the cusp of codgerdom, I’m inclined to look both ways in time before going on.

I will ask your indulgence to ramble. Isn’t that is how us old guys in our golden years are cast-maudlin, sentimental, all gushy and teary with nostalgia? I might as well play the part for a few minutes.

In 1978 we lived in Wytheville in the drafty, rambling house on Withers Road. Our daughter (who a few weeks back visited us from South Dakota with her two daughters) was five. Our son would be born in December of that year, and he, alas, will have his own milestone #30 to celebrate or lament later this year.

A few pair of button-fly bellbottoms hung in the back of my closet, but I was most comfortable in my Levis and plaid flannel. The floppy-collared pastel polyester leisure suits spawned by the Bee Gees, “Grease” and “Saturday Night Fever” that year were appalling even then. But by 1978, married-with-children, I was no slave to fashion or the top-40.

It had been eight years since the first Earth Day, a 1970 happening that coincided with my entry as a Zoology major to graduate school at Auburn. The energy of consensus and good will toward the planet was infectious and hope for a healthier, more sustainable world for our children ran high. The greening of America, then the world, was surely at hand! By 1978, I was teaching in the biology department at the Community College, wildflower field-tripping with the earth-children, stalking the wild asparagus, feeling the love.

Gas mileage was going up, CFCs were coming down, and Ohio rivers no longer caught fire. Computers made the cover of Time Magazine that year. Technology was going to make us more efficient, more globally integrated and cooperative–more informed, for sure. Wiser, even. Things were looking better in the Middle East; the Camp David Accord offered hope of new civility in that unsettled cradle of civilization.

Perhaps just being a healthy thirty years old in those prosperous times imbued us with a passion for positive change. There were slippery slopes in world politics, the environment and in our personal and cultural indulgences, sure, but there was also a confidence that collectively, we could overcome the devils of our day.

Even President Carter espoused ethical stewardship toward a sustainable future for all. Think globally, act locally. What could stop us? “Go home and love your family” Mother Theresa answered the next year when asked what we could do to promote world peace.

And in the end, I’ve found her words perhaps the best advice to give my son-and all our children-as they confront the demons and slippery slopes of their second thirty years.

Do as we say, not as we do. Be rather than seem. Think generations ahead. And never wear polyester.

We’ll check back with you in 2038 and pray you will have succeeded in those places where my generation has not yet learned well enough how to care through time for the earth and for each other.

Published in Roanoke Star-Sentinel for Jan 3, 2008 / Fred First

I was working this morning on a piece for the first week of 2008–a year in which I will  celebrate the second anniversary of my 30th birthday.

And so I looked back at 1978–the year I turned 30 and felt the weight of responsibility of all those years. I could hardly imagine being 60. Still can’t.

Fortunately, by that year I was out of the cultural mainstream. (Hmmm. On second thought, I never even put my toes in those waters.) But had I been a younger man and still in college, I suppose I’d have been boogying down to the Bee Gees and John Revolta with my finger jabbing the air as the mirrored ball spun round and round…Boogie Oogie Oogie…

Just for kicks, for those who might still have sufficient neurons firing to remember, take a look at the top 100 songs of 1978.  Here’s the top 15 to get you started.

1. Shadow Dancing, Andy Gibb
2. Night Fever, Bee Gees
3. You Light Up My Life, Debby Boone
4. Stayin’ Alive, Bee Gees
5. Kiss You All Over, Exile
6. How Deep Is Your Love, Bee Gees
7. Baby Come Back, Player
8. (Love Is) Thicker Than Water, Andy Gibb
9. Boogie Oogie Oogie, A Taste Of Honey
10. Three Times A Lady, Commodores
11. Grease, Frankie Valli
12. I Go Crazy, Paul Davis
13. You’re The One That I Want, John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John
14. Emotion, Samantha Sang
15. Lay Down Sally, Eric Clapton

Do you realize how little we know about the cosmos? Indeed, we see through a glass darkly.

Dark matter, yes, I’ve heard of it. We have to postulate its existence because the matter we can see doesn’t account for the effects of gravity we can measure. There must be way more “stuff” out there exerting the familiar attractive force we are familiar with on earth.

But did you know there is also a “dark” (read unexplained) energy more recently uncovered–to the thrill and horror of the cosmologists– that is apparently exerting an effect on that matter of the universe that is OPPOSITE of gravity.

Dark Energy–whatever it is and where ever it comes from–is pushing the galaxies farther away from each other an accelerating pace. The universe is not only growing, but it grows faster all the time.

Recommended: The Hubble Site’s multimedia “slides” on Dark Energy, and the summary page from which the excerpt below and image left were extracted.

“We do know this: Since space is everywhere, this dark energy force is everywhere, and its effects increase as space expands. In contrast, gravity’s force is stronger when things are close together and weaker when they are far apart. Because gravity is weakening with the expansion of space, dark energy now makes up over 2/3 of all the energy in the universe.

It sounds rather strange that we have no firm idea about what makes up 74% of the universe. It’s as though we had explored all the land on the planet Earth and never in all our travels encountered an ocean. But now that we’ve caught sight of the waves, we want to know what this huge, strange, powerful entity really is.

The strangeness of dark energy is thrilling.

It shows scientists that there is a gap in our knowledge that needs to be filled, beckoning the way toward an unexplored realm of physics. We have before us the evidence that the cosmos may be configured vastly differently than we imagine. Dark energy both signals that we still have a great deal to learn, and shows us that we stand poised for another great leap in our understanding of the universe.”

I feel it, don’t you–the turning inward that comes in these shorter days? The earth and I tilt away from heat and light, from the exuberance of summer, and now past the decline of fall, I settle here in the womb of early winter.

What is it I expect to find in this moment, this one room, a single lamp beside me the only sun. Nothing but my fingers move, my mind wanders in place, I wait.

It is nothing less than everything I want to grasp. Its secret is in the passing present–infinity; in the space under the waiting palms of my hands, resting–the cosmos.

We are given so much wisdom in small things. Be still, and know.

When I browsed across this image of the repeating pattern of an aloe plant yesterday, patterns in my own archives came to mind–of the beauty and mathematical order of nature–this millipede image I’ve superimposed here, in particular.

I follow the spiral toward the center. Until spring. And then…

Blogging has changed, this blogger’s life and world have changed in the past five years since Fragments began. I miss the way it used to be those first years. I look forward to the way it will be next year and the next, as small voices join in the growing sea of self-expression, information and ideas that is the expanding world of internet self-publishing.

Yes, I feel cut off from an energy that once existed on both sides of this computer screen back in the early and uncertain days of exploration, experimentation and innovation. I remember the Ecotone–a collaborative group centered around writing about place, for which I was a founding member. I remember the first bloggers’ Carnival of the Vanities (first among the aggregating carnivals and father of subsequent themed postings on trees, birds, nature, cats…) where the first “issue” had maybe a dozen contributions of which mine was one. I remember the first meeting of another “live” blogger on my front porch, while that list has grown to more than a dozen now.

And while I feel “left behind” in many ways online (I haven’t caught on to Twitter or Facebook yet) I also sense the ways that the medium is changing for the better. I have three examples from just this week, and since they include me in some small way in their efforts and activities, I feel included in this evolution towards whatever it is that blogs and blogging will become.

First, I was happy this week to learn of Whorled Leaves–a site that is “an experiment in blogging book communities, web-based friendships, and more inspired by a common love for the natural world.” That group has chosen for this month’s selection to read my book. So our words do live on, and even when they have grown faded and distant to us, those reading them for the first time can make the moments, places and sensations they depict live again.

Blogs that become books (or “blooks”) is a phenomenon that of course didn’t exist in 2002 when FFF began. Now the list is long and growing, and you may have visited Lulu’s Blooker Prize site where over 100 entries from 15 countries competed for the $10000 prize. (Amazingly, I did not win!) Cheryl Hagdorn has created “Blooking Central: Examining published blooks to discover what makes for a blookable blog and how you can turn your blog into a blook.” She gave a mention this week of Slow Road Home in answer to someone asking “if you can read it on the blog, why have the book?” SRH, she said, is “the sort of thing you want to curl up with on your lap in front of a fire or sitting in your glider sipping lemonade. Hard to do that with your lap top and still smell the pine in the Blue Ridge mountains.”

And finally, from amidst the angst and ire of blog-pundritry and the babel of mundane and quotidian blather that composes no small portion of the blogmatter in the universe, Sheila Cason from Guam has created Beauty on the Web, a site “…all about beautiful things found on weblogs.” Here’s another example of how bloggers, blogs and creative energy can work together for good. She asked for and I sent a contribution. You may have something to share as well. Sent it her way.

My writing life no longer is limited to my weblog. But I won’t abandon it, even in its diluted and enfeebled state, because there is still energy to tap into, to add to, to learn from. I don’t think, even as long-lived as I am among bloggers (and among my fellow seniors, for that matter) I don’t think I’ve seen it all yet. There is more to come in my life as writer and photographer, and this blog will somehow be a part of that growth.

How does your blog fit into your life, past, present and future? Do you think of it as obligation or opportunity? As an inspiration or a drain on your creative energies? Is it time for a change in your voice, your brand, your direction that might enliven your time in the edit-box of your blog platform? Now’s a good time to be considering where to go from here. The New Blogging Year is approaching fast!