The moontree lassos itself : 3

5.17.2008

Hiked up north side of Sykes Creek Valley early this morning. Lighting on the oak leaves perfect—green and weightless—felt like I was in Tolkien’s Old Forest (minus menacing sentient trees), or the realm of the Forest Spirit in Princess Mononoke. Life imitates art, apparently.

I ask it all, “why?” And in the river turning stones, grumbling with great unknowable age below the redwoods, I hear (imagine?) a great, whiskery “Yes.” It is impossible to live without affirmation.

If, as the Internet has suggested, the crowning achievement of hiking alone in wilderness areas is a heightened, ultimately humbling awareness of your vulnerability, then the redwood next to my tent that starts to creak vociferously every time a stray wind comes through the glade is doing wonders for my self-actualization.

Thought (am having a decidedly metaphysical day): the creaking pine is the hinge upon which time’s door remains closed.

3:00 PM. Can’t think straight—head’s a muddle, aching since 2:30 this afternoon after brewing a cup of instant coffee on the Whisperlite. Too much reading (all of The Things They Carried today). Head is overstuffed w/ words—grey moldy cushioning erupting from the seams. Have the drinking and smoking blackened the depths of my brains? No more effulgent, bright glow, just ember-red afterburners, barely visible at work beneath layers of physiological grime.


Strange. Thinking of Mom’s doodlings (kind of like helixes) whenever she’s on the phone. My doodles (when I do draw, which isn’t often, except when bored in class) are angular and linear, like ricks of hay or yucca spines. Sometimes they look like a rain-ruffled crow seen from far away.

Sudsed myself down nekkid in Redwood Creek. Got soap in my right eye (hurts like a mother) , in addition to my lower back being assaulted while bathing by mosquitoes, biting flies, and tiny enchanted forest ghosts angered by my intrusion into their grotto of giant sacrosanct trees. Both my shoulders already have been bit raw—something I noticed after waking up from a mid-afternoon nap earlier today. I look like a plague victim.

Have smushed TWO freak-ass, mutant-growth, Nevada-radioactive, gigantic brown spiders IN MY TENT NEXT TO MY HEAD DISCOVERED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT AFTER FUMBLING FOR A FLASHLIGHT TO GO OUTSIDE AND PEE. Suspect they were trying to lay eggs in my ear canal. Makes me think about the fact that I sleep next to the furnace room in the house back in Reno, where there’s probably whole nest of the things getting ready to burst and swarm while I’m asleep, currently hidden in some rotted out rafted.

Tonight, the wind arrives from down valley, harried & staying only a few seconds. From above, it sounds like distant Interstate traffic.

No progress yet re: women.

Sharpness and clarity of vision out here, feeling like invisible flames spurting from tree branches I pass underneath are licking away the strata of corrosive decay, moral uncertainty, and solipsism that have characterized recent months. Sharpness and clarity. So clear & sharp that it cuts.

“You’ve gotta hope that there’s someone for you
as strange as you are.
Who can cope with the things that you do
Without trying too hard.”
-Jon Brion

I probably need someone completely new. Someone a little crazy, overbearing, and obsessive. Who paints cat-shaped color fields and smokes pot and rides her bike and knows how to piss off Congress, who’s slender and frizzy-haired and can backpack Mongolia and brood attractively and likes terrible science fiction. But most of all who knows who to care, sacrifice, and who’s mature enough to recognize the overriding importance of balance, temperance, and judgment. Most of the time. In short, I guess I’m looking for the girl I’ve dreamt about since I was 15, and then give myself over to her completely, tail tucked between my legs.

The sound fro a distant rise comes into the tent. I should be frightened—why is there music playing ten miles from civilization—but instead I’m captivated. It’s 1:04 AM. I’ve just woken up and my eyes feel heavy. It’s the sound of a girl singing, fragile and quiet and cradled by the breeze. I must be imagining things.

Now the wind from downvalley finally comes into the redwood grove with a kind of nervous energy that reminds me of someone arriving late to a party and promptly guzzling a half-bottle of champagne to catch up.

The moontree lassos itself : 2

(now w/ my some of my fotos!)

5.16.2008
I am become a demigod! Observe my glistening, toned figure! (at least 6 tribes of mosquitos and black tribes slain today—am quickly becoming a fearsome figure in insect mythology)

~3 pm: Lying in hot, humid tent after hike. Just took nap. Seem to have thrown out the left side of my trapezium. Poor pack fit? Can barely roll myself up to a sit from a lying down position. Feel a bit like Gregor Samsa. Legs slow to move now & creaky. Like Thor has taken a meat sledge to my thighs and hamstrings. Thought: If I ever hike the AT, my trail name should prolly be “Meat Hammer.” maybe “Giggle Fox.”

Couldn’t sleep at all most of last night—woke up at 11:30 PM after an hour or so of rest, drowning in my own sweat. Have been sweating, in fact, all day. Middle California is impossibly sweaty.

Latest map for the REST OF MY LIFE (like I haven’t been here before) involves doing the AT/CT/PCT a year from now, then joining the Peace Corps/Americorps. Is there a trans-state trail in Oregon/Washington? I wonder. Find girl who is smarter, wittier, and in better shape than I am and dote endlessly on her.

Bear-like, hirsute man @ campsite next door w/ goatee def. should not have taken off his shirt earlier this afternoon.

Tried zazen in tent a few minutes ago, but couldn’t get my jellified legs into position w/out screaming like Julia Roberts @ a shoe sale. But in pain, not delight.

Have to go lay a deuce, but the pot toilet here at Sykes Creek scares the beejesus out of me. Here’s why: (a) It looks like a charcoal grill. (b) Is completely exposed/visible from trail/all of Sykes Creek/America, approximately ten feet above the creek in a clearcut area. (c) No privacy walls *or* paper. I’m afraid someone’s going to light some superheated gas/bed of coals beneath my naked ass & send me cannonballing into the Big Sur River a couple thousand feet below. Or such stuff are nightmares made. So I need to extend thanks to Ben Donatelle for teaching me the simple beauty & functionality of a smooth, palm-sized river stone and a strong stick in the middle of the woods for a delightful sylvan toilette.

5 pm: Asshole walking by my camp stops, says, “Wow… I just hiked ten miles only to find a Cubs fan at the end of it.”

“I’m a humanist. I’d rather kill a human than a snake.” –Cactus Ed

Lying in tent still, unwilling to cook dinner. Too exhausted. Hard even to read—feel as exhausted as an old blacktop highway.

“I see now my basic rule of thumb in writing has always been to write about things as if I didn’t know them—and this would include things that I did know, or thought I knew about.” –Murakami, 133

My chest is breaking into an uncomfortable sweat as I lay in the hellish blue light of the tent tent and try to sleep. No luck. I decide to bathe. I fetch the small green bottle of Campsuds from my backpack. I slip on my tennis shoes, leaving them unlaced. Then I wade into Sykes Creek, shallow and shadowed and clear. The sun casts vines of light onto the rocks below. Here’s California in May: a honeyed afternoon light that cloys to your skin and won’t rob off, nor would you want it to. It catches dust motes & waterstriders & mosquitos in its fine net of golden fire, suspending them in air. Everything from my ankles down is freezing. One of my shoelaces lazily lassoes a rock as it’s caught by the current and heads towards the Pacific. I suds up my hair, rubbing vigorously & watching bluebell blossoms & clumps of pine needles fall into the water. Artifacts from the hike. A crown? And then some mosquito carcasses come falling out, and I feel like a malarial version of Puck. Everything from my ankles on up is sweaty & burning. I catch a nasty whiff of my own BO—that Precambrian, vaguely avuncular odor that haunts YMCAs nationwide. Everything in mid-stream is liquid gold. Siamo amici, caro fiume. Per sempre.

“Maybe, in some distant place, everything is already quietly lost…And as we live our lives we discover—drawing towards us the thin threads attached to each—what has been lost. I closed my eyes & tried to bring to mind as many beautiful lost things as I could. Drawing them closer, holding on to them. Knowing all the way that their lives are fleeting.” -Murakami, 207

screenplay idea: robert downey jr. fending off cocaine-crazed dingos with a billiards cue.

snarly snarl snarl snark snack

early 20s: a vague sensation that there's something worth dedicating myself to, but unable to figure out exactly what it is, or maybe (ugh) already had it and lost it. meaning is: phosphorous fire through frosted glass. No commensurability for loss. General lack of meaning re: existence. Questioning, but reminiscing parents' values. Am strangely nostalgic for weirdest things: King Soopers donuts at church growing up, mom's same old crummy/delicious rice & fish dinners. Thinking about past loss like looking into the white fanged heart of a moon-eating sun. Emotional paralysis that's strangely pleasurable because it seemingly lifts any personal responsibility on my part. What would Camus say? Probably that I should've gotten over Camus when I was 18. But: can't *not* think about sarah, but thinking about sarah is impossible to even think about.

Not a day goes by that I don’t think about her. That time I had to pull the car over on I-70 w/ Gillian Welch on the radio ten minutes after dropping her off to lose her to Paris, pressing my forehead into the steering wheel and losing my mind at an incredible accelerating tempo. Hot tears and my stomach in a vice and the sharp warm auguring of my organs by the fresh cut of a new loss. And in that loss, love showing its incomprehensible face. Little comfort. A warm June Colorado day and a nervous-looking security guard pulling off onto the shoulder, "hey, can I be of service?"
Which is why I have to lie knotted up in the comforter most mornings and try to asphyxiate myself in the mossy warm stench of my bedclothes.
I want my old heart back.
Getting dark now. Radiohead weather outside--ropes of wind flogging the tent walls i the dark and quiet, menacing oakleaves talking to one another in radio crackles.

The moontree lassos itself : 1

The following posts are transcribed, with some edits, from a journal kept on a backpacking trip in the Ventana Wilderness near Big Sur, California in mid-May, 2008, just a month before the entire area got the shit brûléed out of it by one of the largest wildfires of the summer. This was the trip that finally got me interested in backpacking and general, beard-sporting, retro outdoorsmanship/running again, by circuitous way of a long talk with my father about canyons, women, Transcendentalism, and religion. You know, manly shit. Like most things I do. Beyond the usual backpacking gear, I brought with me on this trip a warmish 6 of Budweiser, purloined from my cowboy roommate’s stash, but which didn’t last beyond the first night, where I carcamped near the town of Big Sur before hiking in early the next morning. Also carried in my backpack where two books brought along for the first pleasure reading in months: Haruki Murakami’s novel Sputnik Sweatheart, and Tim O’Brien’s often-anthologized collection of Vietnam short stories, The Things They Carried.) What follows is mostly in telegraphic fragments and short sentences, as that’s how I tend to record things when I’m by myself, hoping to later cobble them together into something larger and more seamless. Images are not my own, as my I'm-too-cheap-to-give-yahoo-money flickr account has been totally maxed out this month. Whatevs.


5.15.08
Things seen on the road (five hour drive from Reno to the town of Big Sur) this afternoon:
-“Lightfigher Blvd.”
-Large building’s skeleton in Sacramento—a high-rise—one floor covered in a green, ribbed tarp—pale & bulbous against the high blue haze of a California sky. Summer is infecting everything—a different quality of light.
-Death Cab’s “Title & Registration,” it turns out, is prescient. Determines me to make some sense of Sarah while I’m out here—can feel some of the loamy marsh of my brain’s sorry current state beginning to bilge.

Other things seen since the road:
-Out on the beach at the State Park at Big Sur, feeding a wary beach raven some Bold Party Chex Mix, which hopefully are not lacerating the poor bird’s unprepared GI tract. Cute slender girl in a pink t-shirt, barefoot, holding her tennis shoes by their tied-together laces approaches: “you’re ruining wilderness”
“It’s not exactly wilderness.” (I point to California 1, way behind the beach, the sound of traffic, etc.)
“What?” (removes iPod earbuds)
“Forget it.”
-To my left, a middle-aged asian woman in a HUGE sunhat and a long skirt with floral patterns, getting pummeled by the stiff breeze coming in off the surf. She was picking her way across the shore a few minutes go, seemingly searching intently for something. Now she’s doing calisthenics. (Californisthetics?)
-A few degrees below the sea horizon, two ominous sets of black fins.

New development: am apparently camping next to the Swedish Bikini Team. Just came back from the beach to find three nubile, impossibly tan, suspiciously clean San Diego blondes setting up their camp approximately three feet from my own. Am sweating from pores I didn’t even know existed. Overheard:
“Victoria, where would you like your sports bras?”
Was unaware that this backpacking trip was in actuality a descent into my imagination’s sordid equivalent of Chris Isaak’s video for “Wicked Game.” Christ, they’re giggling. They won't stop giggling.

“at night, scruffy bears hang around your cabin.” –Murakami, 5

the sea’s sound a slow crumpling of tinfoil
(or is that the noise of distant traffic?)
(Swedish Bikini Team continues to giggle while erecting tent. Jesus.)

“No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.” –Kerouac, quoted in Murakami, 5.

Just before sundown, while drinking the last of the Budweiser, am accosted by woodland creature. Squirrel? Ground squirrel? Pygmy sea marmot? Can’t tell in this poor light, although the moon’s supposed to rise in an hour or so.

Rooms improved by cut
flowers in black vases.

If you want to write, the best thing you can do, I think, is to not write and ride through some time and experience first. And then go hungry for a while. Stop eating, feel your gut begin to rot and fall apart.


When will I have spent enough time outdoors to tell individual ravens apart, I wonder?

Note: that pipe tobacco when consumed with rolling papers does not lead to a good experience has been duly noted. Blech.

Written on the campsite’s picnic table: “death is the Mother of beauty,” scrawled next to a pentagram. Keats meets Slayer, I guess. Also written on the table: “Ron’s back always hurts” and then a particularly morose, almost frantic-looking frowney face. Took out Bic and added: “Cameron empathizes with Ron.” My back always already hurts.

Scene in a novel featuring a disaffected father gradually losing touch with reality as his brain literally shrinks inside his skull:
“Look, Paula drew you a picture in church today!”
“Is that supposed to be me?”
“Of course! Look, it’s us camping.”
“Oh.”
“What?”
“I don’t see it.”
“What?”
(Paula starts to cry. Mother looks confused. Father stares blankly at drapes.)
“How is that supposed to be me? That looks nothing like me.”

“If it’s something a single book can explain, it’s not worth having explained.” –Murakami, 52

"I had no intention of shooting the elephant": (Post)colonialism, Ecocriticism, and the Politics of the Monstrous Beast

any feedback is welcomed.

In November, 2007, the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) cheerily revealed the Games’ official mascots at a press conference. Designed to represent the “people, geography, and spirit of British Columbia and Canada” and “personify the values and essence of the 2010 Winter Games.” Designed by a Vancouver-based firm, Meomi Design, the three “critters”—Sumi, an “animal spirit,” Quatchi, a sasquatch, and Miga, a snowboarding sea bear—are loosely inspired by the island’s First Nations traditions.
The brightly-colored, anime-influenced mascots raise a litany of questions. Does the fact that the VANOC expects to make at least $45 million Canadian dollars from merchandizing authorize its use of native beliefs in the characters’ design, particularly when First Nations constituents can expect to receive no compensation from the sale of plush dolls and lanyards emblazoned with their cultural symbols? Who “owns” mythology, particularly in the case of creatures like Sasquatch whose image has traveled across regional and national boundaries and been reformed through decades of global dissemination? And is Sumi’s characterization as a “guardian spirit” who “works hard to protect the land, water and creatures of his homeland” problematic? Especially considering Vancouver Island’s Clayoquot Sound as the site of a memorable environmental flashpoint in the early 1990s, where controversy erupted over attempted logging of old-growth stands of forest—an event in which the land rights of First Nations coastal tribes were, by many accounts, completely ignored?

Vancouver’s contentious foray into the realm of monsters—even cute ones—is, my project argues, yet another iteration of political uses and misapprehensions of what I call the “hyperbolic animal” in postcolonial settings. From Blake’s Tyger to Kipling’s Shere Khan to Jules Verne’s mastodons and hominids in Journey to the Center of the Earth, monstrous animals have been an integral part of how both indigenous writers and explorers encounter, map, and—most critically—represent and produce spaces.

I am motivated by what possible insights an ecocritical study of the hyperbolic animal (or animals entangled in aesthetic modes of the grotesque and sublime) in colonial and postcolonial contexts might offer. As my project is situated at the crossroads of postcolonialism, animal studies, and ecocriticism, I follow Elizabeth Deloughrey and Cara Cilano’s important contention that critics working at this conjunction must foreground the historicism of “modified” landscapes and creatures, thereby refusing colonial discourses of the “natural” or “authentic” environment, as these constructions can be revealed as colonial fantasies of “the garden of Eden, or a myth of the hyperfecundity of the tropics” (79). How might the “unnatural” bodies of mythic or cryptozoological beasts complicate gendered and racialized notions of authenticity? I also respond warmly to Susie O’Brien’s perspective that Western ecocritical inquiry must tread carefully as it examines postcolonial and global literatures, as it must do so “without replicating the consumptive drive of empire” where “the world’s texts are rendered open to the Anglo-American critic’s piercing ecocritical view” (77). I agree wholeheartedly with O’Brien that critics of global literature should attempt to highlight “inassimilatable” or culturally resistant aspects of a text. I wonder if we can productively read the mythic beast, particularly in the case of Amitav Ghosh’s tiger in The Hungry Tide, as a metonym for the boundaries of linguistic assimilation, as well as anthropological and zoological understanding.

My project will explore the idea that monstrous beasts are not simply embodiments of anxieties over humanity’s place in nature. The enduring presence of the monstrous beast in colonial and postcolonial literatures also provides insight into how representations of nature can be refracted to abet, or in some cases challenge, imperialist meaning-making. My project thus argues that encounters with eco-monsters, from Melville’s great whale to Amitav Ghosh’s man-eating tigers in The Hungry Tide, are not simply run-ins with sublime nature “red in tooth and claw”; they are also encounters with language and competing epistemologies.

I hope, however, that my readings will also shed light on larger questions. What do thrilling accounts of half-glimpsed or half-known animals uncover about larger cultural attitudes towards the non-human? How do explorer’s accounts (whether fictional or not) of monsters witnessed in the hinterlands of Empire reflect or challenge colonial ways of organizing experience and engaging with nature and other cultures? Can these beasts’ modern popularity be tentatively read in service of a strange form of environmental advocacy? How is masculinity (de)constructed in hunting tales that feature monstrous beasts? Or, as in Eric L. Gansworth’s recent collection of Sasquatch poetry, Breathing the Monster Alive and some of Nalo Hopkinson’s short fiction suggest, how might these potent and resilient myths of megafauna provide avenues to reconstitute identity, rethink the body, and reappropriate indigenous culture? What light might explicitly anthropomorphic “monsters”—the speaking beasts in Kipling’s The Jungle Book and Barbara Gowdy’s recent econovel The White Bone—shed on cultural dynamics and assumptions?

More broadly, I investigate the idea that the stories we tell about beasts dramatize and throw into sharp relief some recalcitrant antinomies in (post)colonial thought: the troublesome distinctions between human and animal; myth and reason; ecological ideologies of conservation, stewardship, and dominion; and savagery and civilization.


Possible Primary Texts (novels, unless otherwise noted)

American
Burroughs, Edgar Rice. Tarzan of the Apes. (1914)
Gloss, Molly. Wild Life. (2000)
King Kong. Dir. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. Perf. Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong. (film, 1932)
London, Jack. The Sea-Wolf. (1904)
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. (1851)
Pyle, Robert Michael. Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide. (nonfiction, 1995)
Zelazny, Roger. The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, and Other Stories. (short fiction, 1974)

British
Kipling, Rudyard. The Jungle Book. (1894)
Orwell, George. “Shooting an Elephant.” (essay, 1936)
Wells, H.G. The Island of Dr. Moreau. (1896)

Canadian
Gowdy, Barbara. The White Bone. (2000)
Hopkinson, Nalo. Skin Folk. (short fiction, 2001, esp. “Riding the Red” and “Slow Cold Chick”)
Martel, Yann. Life of Pi. (2001)
Ondaatje, Michael. The Dainty Monsters. (poetry, 1967)

French
Heuvalmans, Bernard. In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents. (nonfiction [supposedly], 1967)
Verne, Jules. Journey to the Center of the Earth. (1864)
Verne, Jules. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. (1870)

Indian
Devi, Mahasweta. “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha.” In Imaginary Maps (trans. Gayatri Spivak). (1994)
Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. (2005)
Narayan, R. K. A Tiger for Malgudi. (1983)

Italian
Messner, Reinholt. My Quest for the Yeti. (nonfiction, 2001)

Maori
Ihimaera, Witi. The Whale Rider. (1987)

Tuscorora (Native American)
Gansworth, Eric. Breathing the Monster Alive. (multi-generic work, 2006)

...and I'll spare you the tediousness of reading my annotations of secondary and theoretical texts. Suffice it to say that they, through and through, deal with animal representation, the grotesque, culture-power relations, and critics from (duh) postcolonialism/ecocriticism champing at the bit and getting fussy with one another.

Pavement - Space Ghost

(because i'd forgotten about this)

Sebadoh-Skull

thanks to elizabeth (bereft of an impossibly cute name, but towards which end yam-bear and i are fervently knocking our skulls together) for reminding me how pure and tingly this band is.

sick morning

Four Poems for Robin
by Gary Snyder

Siwashing It Out Once in Suislaw Forest

I slept under rhododendron
All night blossoms fell
Shivering on a sheet of cardboard
Feet stuck in my pack
Hands deep in my pockets
Barely able to sleep.
I remembered when we were in school
Sleeping together in a big warm bed
We were the youngest lovers
When we broke up we were still nineteen
Now our friends are married
You teach school back east
I dont mind living this way
Green hills the long blue beach
But sometimes sleeping in the open
I think back when I had you.

A Spring Night in Shokoku-ji

Eight years ago this May
We walked under cherry blossoms
At night in an orchard in Oregon.
All that I wanted then
Is forgotten now, but you.
Here in the night
In a garden of the old capital
I feel the trembling ghost of Yugao
I remember your cool body
Naked under a summer cotton dress.

An Autumn Morning in Shokoku-ji

Last night watching the Pleiades,
Breath smoking in the moonlight,
Bitter memory like vomit
Choked my throat.
I unrolled a sleeping bag
On mats on the porch
Under thick autumn stars.
In dream you appeared
(Three times in nine years)
Wild, cold, and accusing.
I woke shamed and angry:
The pointless wars of the heart.
Almost dawn. Venus and Jupiter.
The first time I have
Ever seen them close.

December at Yase

You said, that October,
In the tall dry grass by the orchard
When you chose to be free,
"Again someday, maybe ten years."

After college I saw you
One time. You were strange.
And I was obsessed with a plan.

Now ten years and more have
Gone by: I've always known
where you were--
I might have gone to you
Hoping to win your love back.
You still are single.

I didn't.
I thought I must make it alone. I
Have done that.

Only in dream, like this dawn,
Does the grave, awed intensity
Of our young love
Return to my mind, to my flesh.

We had what the others
All crave and seek for;
We left it behind at nineteen.

I feel ancient, as though I had
Lived many lives.
And may never now know
If I am a fool
Or have done what my
karma demands.

hiatus

a blog, like a shark, must keep moving forward or else it dies. while this particular forum has been jovially swimming along for nigh three years here, somnambulist's fins aren't moving water with the same vigor of yore. i'm stalling somewhat. a certain lack of cohesion is missing. as such, i'm taking a hiatus from somnambulist and working on something new this summer. we'll see how it goes.


cry not for me, argentina. someday i'll return. with more ranch-bbq flavor than ever.