Fogs

This one evokes the colors of holiday cheer. Or, at least, it evokes the color of cranberries, that bitter fruit (Vaccinium macrocarpon) reputed to be highest in anti-oxidants and a good source of vitamin c (citric acid). Also, how shall we say, known as a fine source of regularity. But these are not cranberries, merely their color. This maroonish red is not so uncommon in nature that it doesn't appear in tree leafs and flowers and fruit and plant matter. Here, as a variant of clover (Lespedeza ...), it is really the patterns of stem and stalk I was after. The structure holding up the leaf and flower. Its straight angularity and the many angles covered, plus the odd focus on the background, where galaxies of leaves cluster together without worry. Everything is reducible to something, but that being so doesn't mean the reduction is always more true than the whole. Water being water being three atoms in a molecule, is that molecule, not its pieces when it is water. How tight its bond? It requires the energy of the sun to break it. The water in some structures can be mineralized into silcates. This petrified wood had such an existence. What is permanent is form, substance changes, but only slightly. Wood become rock. Which is the truth here? Precisely why the cranberry stalks and leaves led me to pondering water and oxygen and reducibility can never be known, but once the can was opened, we knew the worms would crawl.

Everything is once again nudged into a slow spin, like the mass of planets, but movable. The half-truths are massaged, the masses are led. What was once firm is negotiable; anything to save his presidency. They can convince themselves that this is their intended end-game, but we know better. And I shudder at the deaths still to come in the blinding wake of their ill-conceived war and war-like ways. The comfort of turning tides only heightens the anticipation of possible futures yet unspoken. What fools we are, Americans. What foolish myths we follow, what foolish days we lead.

sNow

The first snow to stick fell last night in southern New England. A low pressure system over the Great Lakes pumped spiral waves of wafting clouds into frigid air. The crystalized water must have drifted for hours, judging by the depth. It was followed today by cold sunny weather. Half-melt everywhere. Winter bit this season during Thanksgiving, it came biting. And this is only the first. Today in the journal Science we learned that the past 600,000 years of heating and cooling - a six mile deep record of ice in Antarctica - shows no atmosphere with as much CO2 and methane as ours has today. Low pressure over the Great Lakes comes from the slow release of the excess heat they receive from the greenhouse gas reflection effect. Global warming expresses itself first and foremost as warmer water. As a result, there's energy out there for more than one storm this season, and they expect they'll be heavy ones. In fact, the Lakes have been getting warmer for years. Each summer for decades, the surface temperatures are quite high. This year, the highest they have been in five years by June. The rule of gathering suggests this could only happen if heat was already stored below. The Great Lakes are one of two great storm engines for New York, New England and the Atlantic Provinces. This past summer was the most active hurricane season on record, and the Gulf States of the United States and Mexico were host to the strongest hurricane ever recorded, as well as the fourth and sixth strongest ever (Katrina, by the way, was #6 of all time). This winter, we'll be host to the product of warm Great Lakes weather systems. Already, the temperatures are above normal. And let me just quote from the article to the right, from WGN Chicago, "Explosive destabilization of the atmospere is likely to occur when Arctic air sweeps over the warm waters." The Lakes haven't been this hot in November for more than a decade, and that year was a record. Ironically, one of the side effects of global warming is stronger winter storms. What does climate change look like? Watch this winter in a western hemisphere near you.

On a brighter note, George Bush hung out in Crawford and had a happy Thankgiving with about 100 friends who want him to bring all the troop home from Iraq now. He's bound to listen... What kinds of deals are being smoothed over this holiday season? Who will show whom good will and generosity and who will be left out to dry? In the schism between the Thanksgiving break and re-adjournment next year, they are scheming up new good lies, I'm certain, and no doubt we'll hear again about "re-writing history" from the lips of men who carve rhetoric, and graft, for a living. But this time, I hope, in the blinding days of January, we will know what we are looking at, and responding as every good democracy should, slow, in gathering waves of disgust, until the critical mass of revulsion sends the criminal packing to squander other fields in other ways on other people's time. This is my holiday wish.

The Weeks

It's a curious thing, these seasons. Logic is subtle in them. When the sun is lowest, these next eight weeks from now until mid-January, the darkest, shortest of the year, the air begins getting cold and ends getting colder. Halfway through these weeks, the solstice will harken winter, but it will also bring on longer days, higher angles, more radiation and heat to be gathered. Yet, the days will get colder. More light, more heat, colder air. Into the next season, it will be the same. The hottest days follow the summer solstice, when the daylight is longest. There is a rule underlying this fact, the subtle logic of nature. There is always a gathering before a change. Roots gather energy and thrust it into the tree, buds gather energy and suddenly unfold into leaves. The factors, the variables, arrange themselves to favor new conditions well before those new conditions come about. Winter arrives before winter arrives, and so on through spring and summer and autumn again. Waves, not pistons. Gradients, not planes. The chopping up of each of these gradients and eventualities into measured time and measured seasons cannot remove their true subtlety; indeed, the chopping up provides the very standard against which to realize the intricate mosaic of constant change that reality presents. We are carvers of time and space, butchers of the universal dance, without which, the rest of our systems would falter.

They are still finding bodies in New Orleans. Human carnage in Iraq. 150,000 will be homeless across 51 states as of December 1st merely by dint of having been poor and housed in New Orleans. 10,000 unemployed a year who once worked for GM. More political crimes and indictments. George W. has put on that grimace he wore all of last year pretending he was in charge and morally aghast that anyone anyone would question his leadership. These are what post-modernists call liminal days and weeks, we stand on both sides of a boundary, everything is in flux. Old strategies are deployed, or, strategies that were once new or didn't seem like strategies suddenly become old; they are on one side, we are on the other. Liminal. A merry Thanksgiving to the imperialists, who need not wait.

End Game

There's a low slant to the sun now. It's rays cut into my livingroom windows first thing in the morning, as it only does during the three months of winter light. It comes early, nothing but empty branches between it and the horizon, low angles of light, even at noon. I can feel the heat ricocheting off the upper troposphere and back out into space. The plants don't capture it either. The miracle of photosynthesis has gone south for the season. Except in the hearty lawn grass that has recovered after fall rains and re-colonized the spaces where crab grass grew during summer months. Crab grass grows agrressively, but it dies on the first frost. This thin blue grass or stem or some such continues using the little bit of sun it gets and has no fear of frost. The days are pleasant now, nights are cold, but mild days. Last November, it was the same. Last December it snowed as if the Pleistocene had never ended. Ten more days of hurricane season, then we'll see what happens next this year. The warmer seasons present so much, so many creatures and living things, so much to see and notice. But the colder days seem cause for reflection. From a vibrant wild world outside to a vibrant wild inner life. Adieu to the warmer seasons, Buenos dias, mis pensandos.

Killing Watch the video at this link. They are faltering and disintegrating in Washington, DC., scrambling to stay one step ahead of the falling dominoes, but as I have always maintained, the truth will eventually rise. What is true, what are facts, what has been done, cannot be concealed forever, by anyone. These are uncertain days now, as hogs at the trough learn their meal has ended. Into the schisms or disintegration, there will no doubt be more violence, more killings, senseless acts of senseless men. But the submersion of reality has ended. What 56 million of us knew and 45 million others decided not to notice, has now become plain for everyone. In terms of sheer cash money, perhaps the most corrupt five years in the history of this state called united. In terms of culture, perhaps the most corrupted quarter century of ideas ever to find political voice in a democracy. And in terms of habitat, perhaps the most destructive century witnessed since the asteroid took out the dinosaurs. Scorching Iraqi civilians with flaming phosophorous, committing the "massive killing" that was Falluja, is the last desperate expression of this desperate philosophy promulgated by these greedy evil men. It has lost traction and now we face its messy retreat. Brace yourselves.

Detritus

The leaves of the scarlet oak (Quercus coccinea) have come to dominate the piles of dead leaves around the yard. This species, yet another common tree of the region, although in its northernmost habitat here, is partial to poor sandy upland soils; it must be in heaven in the ground where it grows across the right-of-way. This is the fastest growing of the oaks, and, so says the experts, shoots quickly up into the air for 20 years before it reaches maturity and begins to drop seed. It cannot stand shade, so if it does not attain canopy status, it will not survive. The sprouts around its base are not scarlet oak, but some other variety of the same species. Waiting. The tree that dropped these leaves is probably 40 years old and has reached about half its full potential height. It held its leaves until just before the killing frost and then dropped them, as most trees tend to, in a sudden fall - over the course of several hours one morning, they simply drifted off the branches like snowflakes and landed on our driveway. This pile will be pressed and fed into our composter where it will become soil next year or the year after. Our neighbors send their lawn piles away in large brown bags where someone else will make soil and sell it back to them. We hold ours and cook it ourselves. The trees always cooperate, whatever the species.

Cut light and cold air pressing down from the Arctic. We all need to sleep more. The trees go dormant. All but the heartiest of green plants have withered and retreated for the season. No bird song at sunrise, but for the complaining crow and occassional migrating flock of geese. The transitions are everywhere, quietude is upon us. Ironically, at this onset of winter, when life takes a break and waits for the light of January, the political winds are blowing spring-like. Over weeks now, as if a a pile of festering swamp-rot has been opened to the oxidizing processes of the open atmosphere, the gasses of corruption and ineptitude have wafted into the air. Beneath the swamp, we knew the rotting was taking place, but no one can ignore the stench of methane. Desperate grasps for the rhetorical high-ground seem laughable, now that the swamp is exposed. The methane of rot permeates every crevice. The match is on the flint. We enter fall delighted.

Sycamore-like

The Norway maple (Acer platanoides) was brought here by Europeans to decorate their yards. One can understand the impulse. These trees grow rapidly and produce a dense folliage, delicate green leaves and an utterly delectable tangerine hued yellow fall color. They are also incredibly tolerant of all the atmopheric maladies accompanying modern life - smoke, pollution, automobile impact. The have a strong wood, narrow rings. It is rumored that Antonio Stradivarius made his famous violins out of this material, the little ice age of the 17th century contributing to even denser rings than ever in this popular European tree. Here in the United States, they escape from yards and streets and populate entire forests where they have been given a chance to thrive. I have seen them grow up the inside of apple trees and small bushes, twist against white oaks and scarlets. The trees in this photograph hug the boundary of two properties perpendicular to mine. These leaves conceal an entire house until fall and fall's rains remove them to the ground again. Here in New England, Norway maples, whose Latin name means 'like the sycamore' because its leaves are very similar, have not only escaped cultivation, they have established themselves, "naturalized," (and more) as they say. But the Norway maple is to native New England forests what the European was to Native American lifeways in the 17th century. The tree is classified as "invasive" because it does not share the space it comes to occupy, but, instead, uses its beautiful dense folliage to out-compete other native species, removing nutrients from the ground and shading out sunlight from above. Simplifying.

And so, riots and tornadoes and the threat of a flu pandemic and who wouldn't think these days are those last days of which it is written? Why not? You do not want to be one of those left behind, after the storm, do you? The trouble, of course, is that nothing more than ever happens is continuing to happen today, no more hurricanes or earthquakes or tornadoes or volcanoes. All of these are in statistical proportion to last year and the year before and even the year before that one. These are not the products of sudden change, these things did not just appear. Laws of averages apply. Gradual erosive politics, for example, lead to gradually erosive societies. CO2 builds in the atmosphere and gradually heat build-up takes place in our atmosphere. The trouble is neither the suddenness of it (for it is not sudden) nor its chronic presence (it has been here for some time), the trouble is that we have become, somehow, powerless in this system. It is not that we are being out-competed. It is that we are not even part of the competition at all. You will fill up with gasoline this week, turn on an electrical switch, open the refrigerator, flush a toilet. You have no choice. You have no alternatives, nor alternative skills. We need genuine alternatives, a new vision. Something countering the trend of Norway maples that sacrifice complexity for beauty.