beastly celestial fish

(& caviar

of stars)

Did you catch it? The full moon of August.
9:58:01 PM    comment []  

Pee-powered Battery Smaller Than a Credit Card. Physicists in Singapore have developed a battery that harnesses the chemical power of urine. Small enough to fit in a wallet, the battery has the potential to power medical test kits for diseases such as diabetes, and maybe even charge a cell phone in an emergency. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7850

Vanishing Point. An online project illustrates the cartography of our world as seen through the G7 countries' primary news sources. The interactive map provides viewers with a visual representation of each country's media visibility, or invisibility, over the past 50 days along with country-specific information and a graph that tallies each country's frequency in the news. http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003306.html

Mammal: Star-Nosed Mole. The star-nosed mole is a fabulous burrower with a 22-pronged schnoz six times more sensitive to touch than the human hand. Scientists compare the mole's use of its fleshy, pointy extremity to the "visual tracking of an animal eyeball." This would explain why the largely blind animal has a brain cortex seemingly conducive to vision. These tactile and visual capabilities defy not only the concept of mole, but the concept of nose as well, making the species an apt subject for this literary critique. http://www.believermag.com/nonbookreviews/mammal_starnosed.php

IN OTHER NEWS:

Hunter S. Thompson to blast off on Saturday. The late king of gonzo journalism gets a final send-off when his ashes are dispersed in a fireworks display above his estate in Woody Creek, Colo. http://www.insidedenver.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_4011107,00.html
7:53:09 AM    comment []  

[On an unrelated note, RIP Vassar Clements. You made a joyful noise.]

"Because it is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the doors of all those many mansions inside the head and express something--perhaps not much, just something--of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over and the way a man walks and the look of a street and from what we did one day a dozen years ago. Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are, from the momentary effect of the barometer to the force that created men distinct from trees. Something of the inaudible music that moves us along in our bodies from moment to moment like water in a river. Something like the spirit of a snowflake in the water of the river. Something of the duplicity and the relativity and the merely fleeting quality in all of this. Something of the almighty importance of it and something of the utter meaninglessness. And when words can manage some of this, and manage it in a moment of time, and in that same moment make out of it all the vital signature of a human being--not of an atom, or of a geometrical diagram, or of a heap of lenses--but a human being, we call it poetry."

Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making, London: Faber & Faber, 1967.
10:17:14 PM    comment []  

***

I read this tonight, not for the first time, and I wanted to share it with you on a Friday morning. I hope Salon hasn't powered down their server for the night, which they seem to do a lot, lately. (A blogger curfew. What a notion.)

When I Googled to get a link for Vasco Popa (I've been on a waiting list at Amazon for his Collected Poems for six months!), I found that another blog had printed this poem back in April 2004. They got theirs from Ted Hughes' The Thought Fox. I got mine from his Poetry in the Making. So I guess it's a popular poem. But I share it here anyway today. Just to kick things off.

Other stuff I found in my search included The Independent cultural journal "JI", an intriguing poet named Ruth Stone (whom I had heard of but not enough to penetrate my dense awareness, apparently; my ignorance knows no bounds), and finally the Centre for Ted Hughes Studies. All because "The Small Box" brought tears to my eyes. What a world.

If you do a search of your own, remember (I didn't)--most of the world spells Vasco with a 'k'.

[I borrowed the 1979 David Levine portrait of Popa from http://www.dnevnik.co.yu/arhiva/06-08-2003/Strane/kultdod.htm.]
10:42:30 PM    comment []  

From chemical fingerprints preserved in primitive meteorites, scientists at the University of California, San Diego have determined that the collapsing gas cloud that eventually became our sun was glowing brightly during the formation of the first material in solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago.

Their discovery, detailed in a paper that appears in the August 12 issue of Science, provides the first conclusive evidence that this "protosun" played a major role in chemically shaping the solar system by emitting enough ultraviolet energy to catalyze the formation of organic compounds, water and other compounds necessary for the evolution of life on Earth. Scientists have long argued whether the chemical compounds created in the early solar system were produced with the help of the energy of the early sun or were formed by other means.

"The basic question was, Was the sun on or was it off?" says Mark H. Thiemens, Dean of UCSD's Division of Physical Sciences and chemistry professor who headed the research team that conducted the study. "There is nothing in the geological record before 4.55 billion years ago that could answer this."

...

"This measurement tells us for the first time that the sun was on, that there was enough ultraviolet light to do photochemistry," says Thiemens. "Knowing that this was the case is a huge help in understanding the processes that formed compounds in the early solar system."

Astronomers believe the solar nebula began to form about 5 billion years ago when a cloud of interstellar gas and dust was disturbed, possibly by the shock wave of a large exploding star, and collapsed under its own gravity. As the nebula's spinning pancake-like disk grew thinner and thinner, whirlpools of clumps began to form and grow larger, eventually forming the planets, moons and asteroids. The protosun, meanwhile, continued to contract under its own gravity and grew hotter, developing into a young star. That star, our sun, emanated a hot wind of electrically charged atoms that blew most of the gas and dust that remained from the nebula out of the solar system.

Planets, moons and many asteroids have been heated and had their material reprocessed since the formation of the solar nebula. As a result, they have had little to offer scientists seeking clues about the development of the solar nebula into the solar system. However, some primitive meteorites contain material that has remained unchanged since the protosun spewed this material from the center of the solar nebula more than 4.5 billion years ago.

Thiemens says the technique his team used to determine that the protosun was glowing brightly also can be applied to estimate when and where various compounds originated in the hot wind spewed out by the protosun.

"That will be the next goal," he says. "We can look mineral by mineral and perhaps say here's what happened step by step."

More: http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/mcmeteorite.asp
1:13:25 PM    comment []  

Nothing trying. Just a walk across the road, up the track, and along the top of the low western ridge to my old sitting rock.

The last time I came here everything was green and bursting into bloom, or about to, and the ground was still soft from snowmelt and spring rain. Now it's hard and dry, waffled bootprints from my spring hikes appear chased into stone alongside the deep mated teardrops of impressed deer hoofs. Almost all the herbaceous plants and grasses are dead-dry, long gone to seed. Here and there I see an artemisia or rabbitbrush, still green and tender, who love the hot months best. Next largest, the purshias--bitterbrush--shoulder-high old men of the slopes, beloved of antelope and rabbit, the pale green-white blooms that frothed them over months ago gone brown now at the tips of their black scraggly limbs.

Those perfumers the junipers celebrate summer. These so-called "trash" trees stand jewelled with fat brilliant blue new berries. I close my eyes, lean into their bright rigid green, and inhale. The sun-warmed scaly needles give off an incense to rival even autumn-rain-on-sagebrush.

A good sound silence this morning: hiss of dry grasses moving in the heated air. Rhythms of a distant quail's repetitive call. At acceptable intervals you can hear the crunch of vehicle wheels in gravel, the creaks and squeaks of a livestock trailer rattling over the bad dirt roads. An intermittant clack and rattle of locusts against the erect dead leaves of May's balsamroot, which clatter anyway when they knock together in a breeze. The horse people across the way recently built a new small stable and corral, and so whinnies, nickers, and snorts insert themselves into the local music.

I hear an elder goat's throaty maaa from somewhere nearby. My downstream neighbor's dozen-and-a-half meat goats defeat all his fences, and so they roam by day in a tight herd grazing up and down these hills and ridges and dirt roads, and trot home to their enclosures every night. I enjoy watching them from a distance, but it sends a chill when I think what they could do to my unfenced herb garden. I'm a good half-mile south and east, at least, though, and they haven't found me yet, and I imagine the dogs discourage them when they get too close.

Due east, Bald Mountain lies revealed between the low shoulders of its companions. Few peaks at this (northernmost) end of the Warner Mountains actually "stand"; it's a youthful range. It would be easy in fact to think of it as Bald Hill were it not for its 8000+-foot elevation. In July a year ago it was still snowcovered, but this year it's been bare of snow since mid-May, and now I see even its green is retreating downslope into folds and crevices ahead of the brown of its drying crown.

The air is good, moving in little puffs around the stones, and so is the forbearing forenoon light. Even the heat is good. I knew it would be.
1:07:24 PM    comment []  

"HHMI researchers have harnessed a mobile gene from the cabbage looper moth and modified it for routine use to determine the function of genes in mice and other vertebrates.

"If the new tool works as they expect, it will speed understanding of genes involved in human biology and disease and accelerate the search for effective new therapies."

Research published in the August 12, 2005, issue of Cell.

For the full story, go to http://www.hhmi.org//news/xu4.html

[Photo borrowed from http://ccvipmp.ucdavis.edu/insects/worms.html.]
10:38:25 AM    comment []  

Today I finished the Lucas Myers memoir Crow Steered, Bergs Appeared, and although I came away from it disappointed in Lucas Myers I did find it the most helpful of my reading so far in terms of insights into Ted Hughes the working poet, and for its links to other resources. I continue in Winter Pollen, Hughes's own prose pieces, which I have been picking through for a few months.

Also rereading Campbell on "Oriental" mythology; I'm having more fun with it this time than I did the first time through.

Another thing I'm having more fun with is Shakespeare. I find I can focus and read through a play and enjoy it. Pleasure comes. What is it about the ways our minds shift as we age...? I studied so ferociously early on and retained nothing. Now it all seems so easy and clear. I could even talk about it if anyone near were inclined to participate in such a conversation.

So I pause again in the making of stuff in order to reinforce the foundations. Perhaps the stuff I make later will be the more substantial for it.

***

Days have been coolish. Mid-80sF. Nice. But when I sit mornings on the back step with Greta I can taste autumn. And I shiver and wonder what approaches on the road.

Hill walk tomorrow, I think.
11:31:20 PM    comment []  

[Image adapted w/o permission from the jacket design for the Victor Scheffler book The Year of the Whale (1996).]
9:38:14 PM    comment []  

The parade of species through my dreams.

Beginning around age 12--kittens. They became cats and lovebirds through my 20s (although once an owl fought a raccoon to the death, punctured with its sharp beak the soft place in the raccoon's throat, and I woke up with the taste of blood in my mouth). Coyotes in my 30s (another story for another time). Smattering of elephants (always starving, last legs, dying, or dead) right along.

Then in 1994 I saw my first bear not in a zoo or circus. In waking life:

True-Life Bear Encounter Anecdote

With my dog Annabelle and a picnic lunch, I was trying to drive to the top of Mt. Hough ("huff") in my vintage VW Beetle along a steep, rough logging road. But I'd come to one ascent I just couldn't get up, and the car had stalled and wouldn't start again, so I let it drift backward to a flat area, parked it, and decided we'd have lunch there, in the woods, near a beautiful clearing carpeted with blossoming balsamroot. It was noon. I sat on a boulder across from the clearing and ate my sandwich while Annabelle, an 8-month-old Queensland Heeler mix, dashed around sniffing things.

When I finished eating I slid off the rock and began walking toward the summit; it wasn't that much farther. I gazed at the sky. I looked at the butterflies. I watched the large cinnamon-colored bear loping in slow motion across the clearing with the sunlight streaming behind it, lighting up the tips of its fur like a fiery halo. Parallel to my trajectory.

About 50 feet away.

Holy shit.

Without breaking stride I turned completely around and walked quickly and silently back to the car. Annabelle had been preoccupied with something she'd found in a hole at the base of a tree, facing away from the bear. Thank God she didn't spot it; she was a hysterical barker. I got us both into the car and then floored it the remaining mile to the top of the mountain. We flew up that slope.

I didn't look to see where the bear went.

At the top we found a vacant fire watch tower, lots of coyote mint, and about a million butterflies. With my heart still pounding out my ribs I stood at the edge of an overlook and looked down on a glacier lake of the purest turquoise I've ever seen.

Heaven.

Now let's go home.

Back to Dreamstuff

After that the bear dreams started. They lasted until we made our temporary move to Bisbee, Arizona, to take some classes in herbal medicine (mid-'97). In the dream that came my first night there, a goofy clown bear was frightened off by a large regal elk, who stepped stage center and simply looked me in the eye.

A elk??

That was it for any animals in my dreams for a couple of years. My first night back in California a mountain lion killed the elk. And so.

Then about 18 months ago that dream came, the tortoise pacing at the transfer station with a crippled owl on its back (a tortoise who is reborn as a young goat when the waiting is over). Since then the tortoise or turtle symbol has cropped up a number of times, most recently (last week) dead. Three new moons ago I received the owl alone--huge, blue, and somewhat dangerous. Not crippled, just immature. (I dreamed of the baby goat recently, too--half grown now, part of a small herd, its family, all of them spotted blue.)

And two new moons ago two blue whales fell from the sky and landed unharmed in a field. The whale has been a peripheral symbol in a couple of dreams since then, but last night it was front and center again. A single whale--I'm sorry, but a whale in outer space.

A Pregnant Cetacean Gestating in a Space Station

And the fetus removed at term--great thick layers of blubber surgically folded aside and the infant removed, because it was about to be sent to Earth.

When I woke up this morning I remembered that Star Trek movie I took my brother to see many years back--which one was it?--where they went back in time to 20th-century San Francisco (hey--I was born in San Francisco...) to nab a mated pair of whales to transport into the future--when whales on Earth had become extinct--to save the Earth from being destroyed (it made sense in context...). And I realize now why the whales in the first dream, the pair of them, fell from the sky--where that idea came from, maybe.

Ohh-h-h-h ...

So whales now, with the owl and the goat maturing. In dreams.

And in life, frogs on my desk. And dead bats in the plant room.
7:26:57 PM    comment []  

Everywhere I walk in the dry grass around the place throngs of locusts leap out with dry clicks and whirrs. Their voracity finally has outpaced many new plants' ability to put forth new foliage and recover. The potatoes are goners. Several of my giant marigolds are just sticks. I discovered today with sorrow the skeletonized hops leaves. A lesson: If you can't get plants in the ground sufficiently early that they can become robust enough to survive the trials of summer, then don't bother. Perhaps fewer than half a dozen of the two dozen plants I put out a couple of weeks ago will survive, and so feebly they are unlikely to persist through winter. The grapevines are untouched, and the artemisias and bee balms and anything fuzzy (lamb's ears, dittany, culinary sage). It's all very sad.

Let's see. That's two consecutive depressing paragraphs--one ending with "moldy" and the next with "sad." Can I generate a third? My brother's very occasional bad behavior--pulling out his hair, usually associated with middle-of-the-night thunderstorms or howling wind--has become a habit. As the two most recent bald patches on the back of his head fill in, I relax, thinking I've finally gotten him to understand why this is a bad thing to do to himself. Then this afternoon I discover that he's begun pulling out his eyebrows. Either that or he had a very unsteady session with the electric razor this morning. In addition, he started his TV hour this evening watching Star Trek: Mirror, Mirror for the 17th consecutive day. We are not on good terms at the moment.

It's very hot. We are stuck in one spot. We love each other a lot. A lot. But the atmosphere is starting to turn, as milk does past its expiration code. Do you know of a philanthropic organization that provides respite vacations for impoverished middle-aged siblings such as we?

I've heard you can harvest and dry locusts and grind them for flour.

Yes, a vacation.
6:00:40 PM    comment []  

I glance, just briefly, at the sky. It is so clear, its planets and galaxies reeling so brightly and so near, that it seems like the face of a descending hammer. The universe is altogether too vast for me to cope with on my own just now.

When I go back in, I release the dogs, and then go about shutting the house down for the night. When I let them in again, Greta comes in, too.

Personal Annals of Olfaction: The first time I called for the dogs, only Sally came in. I did some computering while I waited for Apple to turn up. Then I noticed Sally standing at the open window sniffing and sniffing a certain draft of air with great intensity. I walked over and stood near her and sniffed here and there around the screen. Nothing. So I leaned over near where she had her snout pointed. A cold freshet just there carried in it a faint but sharp and unexpected sensation, something I recognized--chemicals a mammal will release from a certain gland when it is sufficiently terrorized, and a hint of fresh blood. The scents, to my senses, were barely there, but they were unmistakable.

I was shocked. I've been trying to learn to smell what the creatures around me smell when I see them suddenly alert and sniffing the air from a definite direction. This was my second or third (supposed) success. It can be done, then.
11:32:34 AM    comment []  

In the heart of the putative herb garden a single poppy blossoms, deep vivid red-orange in the mess of composted grass hay. It's beautiful, the flower--fragile tissue of its petals drying dark at the edges, wrinkling moistly toward the center. Lovelier than it might appear to me were it one of many others blossoming together, of its kind or not. Glorious, it is, like bindweed on a midden.

I seem not to want to work. I seem just to want to comfort myself always. I sit, I think, I feel pain, I seek to alleviate it. Or numb myself to it. Reading and studying does this, and so does creating if you start with a struck vein. But any casting about mentally only brings the pain again to the fore and creating then seems not worth the risk of stimulating unpleasantness. Better passivity.

Apple sleeps pressed hard against me as I write, the whole of her backbone in contact from my knee to my hip.

In the plant room, a dead bat lies on the wood floor like a tiny black fist, the naked membranes of its wings tightly clutching the empty velvet egg of itself.

I have the week's cookies to bake yet; the sugar and butter are half-creamed together in the bowl, the eggs coming to room temperature on the work table. A few dishes to wash. I'll use today's laundry-water allotment to wash the rag rugs; tomorrow, sheets and towels. By Tuesday we'll be desperate for clean clothes!

I've had a phone call: Surprise Valley Sally will visit me this afternoon. Hallelujah! A human! I'd better finish the baking...
11:32:52 AM    comment []