COYOTE SIGHTING

coyote

Driving back from town this morning, I'd turned down Waterfall Road from Air Bellows Gap Road, approaching the first slight curve to the left, a coyote ran across the road in front of me. It was far enough ahead there was no danger of hitting it. It felt like something magical happened. It seemed to have a glow of clarity about it, which was my own inner response to seeing a coyote by surprise. I examined it visually as it darted across the road, from woods on the right to woods on the left. Big ears, long bushy, straight tail like a fox. A burnt brown color accented in black at the tip of the tail, around the neck, the ears. It ran into the woods a ways. I slowed down to watch it run through the trees. It stopped and stood broadside watching me go by from deep enough in the trees it felt it had an advantage if I set out in pursuit. It all happened in about 3 seconds. My visual sense was on full alert, looking with as much focus as I could, to see as much of the beautiful dog as the moment allowed. I chose not to stop, because I didn't want to alarm the coyote.



It is along that stretch of the road I've had some of my best feral animal moments. A hawk has flown above where a hood ornament would be, keeping its pace the same as mine, flying two or three feet above the hood, turning its head to left and right looking behind at me with one eye, using the other eye to fly with. I kept a pace comfortable for the hawk and it flew with me a hundred feet or more. A crow had done the same thing in the same place. This is over a period of a quarter century. I value those moments the highest. Whenever I have such an encounter, which is relatively frequent, it stamps itself in my memory. Like the time I was standing on a big flat rock in the creek down in the woods. I heard coming from a certain direction in the trees, yip-yip-yip-yip..., a pileated woodpecker. I saw this flying red hammer-headed woodpecker flying straight at me in its particular woodpecker flight, black wings flapping something like a duck's, a blur to either side of the advancing red. It was flying straight toward me, yip-yipping all the way, and it flew straight over the top of my head about 3 feet. Behind it was a second one, flying in the same line, yip-yipping, and flew over the top of my head the same as the first one. It was one of the great moments of my life.



In the time of my first dog here, Sadie, we were out for a stroll in about 4 inches of snow, walking down the back part of Waterfall Road, the old wagon road up the mountain. The road went along the ridge such that the ground went downward rather steeply on both sides, trees all around on both sides. To the right when the leaves are off the trees the waterfalls can be heard and seen a little bit, going toward Whitehead from here on the mountain. The muffled silence in a world of snow is a silence as profound as the blackness inside a cave. A crow flew upward over the ridge from my left to right, flying just a couple feet over the top of my head. I heard the sound of wings. To mind came the hymn, Angel Band, I hear the sound of wings. It was a sacred moment. Come angel band, come and around me stand. Powerful song. There's nothing in this world like singing this song in an old-time Regular Baptist meeting, the slow, old-timey way, no piano.



There was the time of driving down the mountain, leaving the pavement at Air Bellows, down the road to a place where it leveled off for a ways, on my left, sitting on a fence post, the classic barn owl with the round head and the spike pattern in its head feathers. We made eye contact as I drove by. I was surprised it didn't fly away. The night of the day Jr's soul left the body, when I drove home and parked, opened the car door, a very short distance away, in a tree just the other side of the road, a hoot owl sent me a beautiful hoot. I hooted back to it and said, Hello, Jr. To let him know I got it. In the time I wrote the column in the Alleghany News www.alleghanynews.com/backwoodsbeat/ sometimes I'd go someplace outside and sit in one place to write. This particular time I was in the woods across the road, the sun was setting, it was starting to get dark, I had a train of thought going and couldn't stop. I was writing fast as I could go to get it done before returning to the house. There was time. There is still plenty of time in the gloaming between sunset and darkness. I heard a screech owl over my left shoulder. Very near. I felt what mice must feel when they hear that trill so nearby.



Another time writing in the woods, I'd found a good flat rock by the side of Waterfalls Creek. One side of it sloped gently into the water. I sat cross-legged on the part that was level and dry. I'd started whatever it was, when a water snake swam to the rock I was sitting on and put its chin on the rock just a few inches from my crossed legs. It looked up at me. I looked at the snake. I know them to be harmless, flight instead of fight. They have teeth, but not fangs. They also look like diamondback rattlesnakes, which scared hell out of me the first several I saw. The snake stayed there looking at me a long time. I changed the subject I was writing about and wrote of the encounter with the snake as it was unfolding. The snake came around to where the rock sloped into the water and crawled out of the water beside me to my right. It crawled over to me and curled up, not coiled, beside me. I told the snake, don't get on me. If you get on me, I'll jump, that will scare you, you'll jump, we'll have an unsuccessful association. Stay off me and you're welcome to do what you like. This is your home. I'm just passing through.



Cement-headed me didn't get it that the snake was trying to tell me something. It would look at me with eyes that said, I am a serpent. You're supposed to be afraid and get up and leave. After a period of apprehensive time, the snake went back to the water and swam in the pool part of the creek in front of where I sat. It gave me an Esther Williams watersnake swim routine, and it was up there among the very most beautiful things I've seen. The snake was watching me watch it swimming around and around. It took off over a shallow section over rocks to the next still pool, head held high, riding the water like a surfer. It turned around and swam back up against the current to the pool in front of me. It looked at me with frustration. It swam over to a place where it swam up beside another snake twice its size in the shade of a rock standing on its side. I assumed then the snake I'd been watching was a she. The big snake was eye-balling me like it was wanting to cast a spell on me. I remembered snakes charming birds with their eyes. This bull watersnake was drilling his focus on my eyes. It became unsettling. I finally realized I was sitting on their afternoon sunning rock. It was that time of day. She needed her sunning rock. The two of them lay there side by side, glaring at me. I decided it was time to hurry up my writing and go. It was feeling creepy. I thanked the snakes for allowing me to enjoy their sunning rock, and apologized for taking so long to catch on to what she was trying to tell me.



Feeding the small birds is my stay-at-home encounters with the the feral world. I don't want to tame them or make them unafraid of humans. I keep a distance they're comfortable with. This morning I went out to feed them about an hour earlier than usual, went to the mailbox first. All the way to the mailbox and back I saw and heard the birds, the snowbirds, titmice, chickadees flying through the trees toward the feeders, calling to me. One of the red squirrels ran the length of a white pine branch. The birds living in the cluster of trees around and near the house gathered in the upper branches of the trees around the bird feeders watching the giant that feeds them walking back from the mailbox. I put seeds in the birdfeeders and around on the ground. They watched. A brave chickadee flew down to the feeder to be first.

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THE CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH THE MOVIE

memorial to the rape of nanjing 1937

It feels like I have seen the most serious film of my life. That's saying a lot. I mean it a lot. It was a Chinese film, THE CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH, directed by Chuan Lu, 2009. It was made in black and white, made to look like documentary footage from 1937. It was a "drama" while at the same time mayhem. It is the story of the Japanese invasion of Nanjing (Nanking) that gave the word ruthless new meaning. It is called the Forgotton Holocaust. It makes me think of the Germans doing the same thing in Europe at the same time. Jews get all the holocaust credit with 6 million. There were also 6 million gypsies, and 6 million Russians. Where is the gypsy holocaust museum? Maybe gypsies don't have the money, or the history. This incident at Nanjing, called the Rape of Nanjing, was a holocaust we don't hear about. Asians. Coloreds. Chinks. Who cares? The people involved cared. They cared plenty. It was the same government in Japan that allied with the Nazis and later committed the Pearl Harbor mistake. The present day Chinese government still has issues with Japan over that time. 

The film followed a few people who survived, visually telling their stories, picturing their accounts of what they witnessed. All the witness stories woven together made the entire context of the film. I've read a Chinese novel, Red Sorghum, by Mo Yan. It is a story of that time of immeasurable atrocities. I think I'm coming to understand why WW2 soldiers who fought in the Pacific continue to hate the Japs to this day and will unto the day they die. The rise of the Japanese auto industry was a sharp stick in the eye to the American WW2 vet. Like Jews will be a long time getting over Germans. They're still not over the Egyptians, so I'll conjecture they'll never be over the Germans. I doubt the Chinese will be getting over the rape of Nanjing any time soon. It was unconscionable. It was such a thing the entire Japanese nation, even people today who knew nothing of it, would do well to turn everyone to public repentance for such acts. I feel repentance for what my country did to the Indians, and to the black people, but what good is that? What's done is done. Japan met it's karmic debt with the firebombing of Tokyo and 2 major cities destroyed utterly. Something like the rape of Nanjing is surely a national karmic debt. Like nuking two Japanese cities is a karmic debt for USA.

In the near future when Iraq has recovered from American "liberation" there will be a genre of novels, films, documentaries, histories of American atrocities. We pass them off and deny them. Show them on the tv news, no big deal, they deserve it, they're colored, they're poor, can't understand their language. We're number one. So what if they take their clothes off and get dogs after them. So what. They're sand niggers. That's how the Japanese saw the Chinese as they were killing them and tormenting them. No big deal. Chinks. Poor. China was at its most vulnerable in its entire history. Colonists were milking China dry. The dynasty was over. China was up for grabs. Japan invaded and conquered the whole country. The Japanese were the Nazis of the East. In both cases, their aggression turned on them and they were ultimately defeated.

This film, The City of Life and Death, brought to mind WW2 documentaries shown on tv in the 50s on Victory At Sea for the Navy, and for the ground forces, You Are There and The Big Picture. The way this film was made, it had the seeming of 2 hours of You Are There: The Rape Of Nanking. It was exactly like that kind of documentary with film footage from the inside, except this film told individual stories as they happened. Horrific is the word for it. Makes me want to go to the Nanjing memorial and sit in prayer all day. In my growing up, influenced by television, movies, adults, I saw the Chinese as faceless masses, as they were always depicted. The Japanese were the buck-toothed pilots in goggles. The Chinese said Chop-chop, had a braid down their backs and ran with short steps. Half a million Chinese killed? Population control. Who will miss them? They all look alike. Cone heads.

This is the human condition. This is what human beings think of each other. What do we do when we get together? We fall out and start killing each other. Last man standing wins. The American solution to every problem: I kill you. In this time and place, the land is protected by the greatest arsenal the world has ever known, an arsenal that is the economy. The biggest and fiercest military machine on earth prowls the globe by satellite making pre-emptive strikes to keep resistance to American oil interests down. We assassinate democratically elected presidents in other countries and replace them with military dictatorships. It's hilarious in electioneering time to hear so much bullshit about democracy and all that goes with it. What Americans have done in Chile, all up and down Central America, the vulnerable countries in South America, keeping them under control, making them ask, Democracy? What's that, senor? Christians brag about loving peace. Buddhists brag about loving peace. Muslims brag about loving peace. Set them at one another and you'll see the most vicious of human possibilities of hate come to the surface. India. Hindus and Muslims. Love, love, love, peace, holy peace. I cut your head off. 

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APOCALYPSE NOW AND REDUX

 napalm in the morning smells like victory

I spent 6 hours watching my favorite movie twice. I'd not yet seen Redux. Every time I went to it on netflix it was listed 'long wait.' This time it had no wait signal, so I ordered it, it came, 2 discs, the original and the Redux. I watched Redux first because I wanted so much to see it. Besides, I'd already seen the original half a dozen times. I'd heard Coppola in an interview talk about how the Redux satisfied what he wanted to do with the film. I'm of a different mind. I watched the original immediately after Redux and preferred it. The part in Redux of the French colony up the river added nothing to the story but a long boring section. The part about the centerfold girls after the show was boring. All it added to the story was seeing the girls of the USO show were a bunch of deadbeat junkies. So what. It also added long sequences of Marlon Brando boring me to death. Those three additions only made the movie longer. That's all. They seemed to me to take a movie with the substance of clam chowder and thinned it down to tomato soup.

When it was over, I was ready to see the original to erase Redux from my mind. From the time the original started, it seemed to have a golden glow of clarity around it, the perfectly cut gem. Of course, it was in my mind, not in the film, but it was my mind's response to the film, which, after seeing Redux, was a relief. Even the repeated scenes, all of them, seemed better in the original. For one thing, from scene one, I knew I was seeing the film I love more than any other I've ever seen, though with several close seconds. My aesthetic eye was set to Perfectly Cut Gem as I sat back and enjoyed my favorite movie again. Coppola's decision to ditch those three extraneous scenes that slowed the film down and thinned its substance show me his genius, as well as the completed film itself. Redux showed me Coppola's self-editing eye is a good one. Even if he had help making the decision, he made the final decision, I suppose.

In Redux, Martin Sheen's character bought some deadbeat junkie pussy for two barrels of boat fuel. His character was a little too rational for such a vastly ignorant move. That was something the surfer on the boat might have done, Lance, when he was on lsd. Maybe it was to show Sheen had lost his good senses, but that would have been the only way it showed at that point, and beyond. The French woman later was out of place too. It didn't fit Sheen's character again, and nothing about the entire scene with the French advanced the story. It was Coppola's baby, not mine, and he had his own reasons. Too much of Brando at the end, way too much, and too much of Sheen in confinement, too many varieties of confinement. By the time he got the deed done, I was so bored I wanted to hit fast forward. I liked what Sheen said of Brando's quarters, "It smelled like slow death in there, malaria, nightmares." But, by the time Redux was over, I was so bored I'd become fidgety.  

My objection to the deleted scene with the French was about placing the war in the context of history, even of reality. The story of the film was this is absurdity, not reality. It was every bit a version of Jaroslav Hasek's GOOD SOLDIER SCHWEIK as it was of Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS. The absurdity of war. Sheen's character said, "Charging a man with murder in this place is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500." Another good observation by Sheen, "The bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam, you needed wings to stay above it." In the Absurd tradition, this film rates among the best, up there with Pinter and Beckett. Early in the story, the absurdity is noted with smiles and laughs, resignation to the absurd everywhere. First words in the story, Sheen looking out the blinds of his hotel room, says, "Saigon. Shit." It struck me early on, when Chef, the Cajun guy on the boat, had his first melt-down moment, Lance, the surfer, was watching him, laughing like he was having an acid experience. Both their faces in the same scene, one freaking out and losing it, the other looking on amused. I felt like this was the turning point in the nature of absurdity. Before, the absurd was something to be laughed at. The comedy went out of it at this point.

The US military was the comic part of the overwhelming absurdity, Kurtz was the sinister part of the military's yin/yang of absurdity. They said Kurtz was insane. The absurdity of his insanity was that it seemed not to be insane at all. When Dennis Hopper gave for an example of Kurtz's genius something he'd said the day before, "If is the middle word in life." This observation is so college freshman profound it can only ring absurd coming from a grownup mega-military man. Kurtz's reading of TS Eliot's THE HOLLOW MEN is indeed profound and a comment on the absurdity:

          We are the hollow men

          We are the stuffed men

          Leaning together

          Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

          Our dried voices, when

          We whisper together

          Are quiet and meaningless

          As wind in dry grass

          Or rats' feet over broken glass

          In our dry cellar.

               Shape without form, shade without color,

          Paralyzed force, gesture without motion.... 

The absurd war is an excellent vehicle for a work of art commenting on an absurd time, or an absurd era. The absurdity of wiping out an entire village because the surf had six foot peaks, good for surfing, is played to the absurd Nth degree by Robert Duvall, Kilgore (kill / gore). When the village woman threw a hand grenade into the landed helicopter and it exploded, Kilgore seeing it from the air, commented, "Fucking savages!" He ran her down with his chopper's machine guns, saying, "I'm gonna get that dink bitch." There, too, another absurdity, common American usage with language. The absurdity becomes all the more sinister as the story travels up the river, deep into jungle, deep into uncharted territory, deep within where the soldiers are tripping on acid, unto the place where the ultra-soldier is tripping on ego in a primitive world of spear-chuckers and death. The Redux version of the long interaction between Sheen and Brando left the absurd and became ridiculous. Coppola was right to cut most of it. At the end of the Redux version, Brando comes across as a dumbass. Trimmed down to the essential, those scenes at the end are powerful and penetrating, giving a larger than life feeling to Brando's character.

The books he was reading were profound for the time, FROM RITUAL TO ROMANCE, THE GOLDEN BOUGH, and a TS Eliot volume. Ten years later, it would have been Joseph Campbell titles. In that time, these titles identified him an intellectual. He was torn between war and peace. In his pursuit of war, he dove deep within, so deep there was no turning back. He needed an agent from the military itself to release him from the ongoing war within, to give him peace, which, evidently, he drew Sheen's character to himself to do. He had gone as far on his journey away from this world as he could of his own power. He needed someone to release him from his body. The greatest absurdity of all was that this entire mission, from the time it was given to Sheen's character unto his return, never happened and will never happen. Coppola's appearance in the film as director telling Sheen and others to "act like you're fighting," reinforced that none of it ever happened. It's just a story.

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MAYBE SO MAYBE NOT

andromeda galaxy

A theme that has been staying with me the last week and even longer, is familiarity with a zillion things, from words learned all along the way in school, information from reading and seeing stories, a lifetime of experience. I have a difficult time now drawing a line between fact and fiction. The moment stays in my mind at the Ralph Stanley show, when the band before Stanley was playing, and pumping up Jesus, a guy jumped up a few rows in front of me, arms in the air for Jesus. He was wearing a tshirt that said Lethal Weapon. Had I not been so stunned, I might have thought to take a picture of that billboard on his back and him up in the air for Jesus. All I could think was: there it is, spontaneous as a bird. I know I'm making much of words that are no more than the title of a movie the guy likes, a men-with-guns comedy, popism. It's absurd in pop culture to make associations according to irony in a culture where the obvious is a mystery.



My inclination is to see the symbolism in the moment, at the same time knowing the symbolism is not inside the moment. It's inside my head only. I impose it on the moment, same as I would reading. The closest I can come to the "reality" of what happens is the guy wore his favorite tshirt to the Ralph Stanley concert, not because he labels himself a lethal weapon, but because it's his favorite movie. Asked about it, he would likely say he's a lethal weapon for the Lord, the devil better look out. I could even go on a bit about the movie having been around perhaps as long as he's been living, and he's advertising it like it's the latest new thing. I don't mean to be nit-picking as much as momentarily blown away by a moment that has relevance to an English major in a way it has with few others. A contemporary American moment, the neutral symbols of pop culture that give the appearance of meaning without meaning a thing, like talk at a cocktail party.



Though it seems a bit awkward to jump for Jesus wearing a Lethal Weapon billboard front and back, from the point of view of the guy in the shirt, he was wearing his favorite tshirt to the concert, the one he saves for special events. Maybe he found it at Roses, which cannot possibly be where he bought it, because it's from his own story, not mine, and I don't know him. This is what has been with me recently, that my immediate perception of a moment is entirely my own, from inside me. In fact, it is only inside me, a thought unspoken. I can follow one little thing like that as a way of looking at the person wearing the shirt, why he wore it, why he bought it, maybe his sister found it in Myrtle Beach and bought it for him. Whatever I might imagine, the first thing I know is that's not how it is. It's the same as taking the test without reading the book. He loves Jesus and he loves that wacky slapstick comedy of a movie. He's a happy guy at a Ralph Stanley concert. That's more how it is than a measure of Western Civ and pop culture in a blender.



Where the confusion of fact and fiction is concerned, I'd say the fact is the guy was wearing a tshirt that said Lethal Weapon. That's it. Right there. Anything I might add to that is fiction. Like I could weave a character in the shirt, make up a life and location to say he's from and evolve it into a story. The story would be fiction. By fact, I think I mean in regard to this dimension of reality we inhabit here on earth subject to natural laws. It looks like, too, that even if I were to write this person's biography, get all the information about his life that can be got from him, family, friends, etc, and write the story, it would be fiction. It would be called fact, but it would be fiction. All I did writing the biography was something like suggest a city by points of light seen from a plane at night. Much would be filtered through my own interpretations. Automatic fiction. Information about the man will be in the biography, but not the man himself. If he seems to come to life, that's a trick in the writing, the fiction.



I've come to a place where I see any telling of any event or moment is fiction, because it is filtered through a human consciousness. A dog wouldn't be telling about it. The dog saw it go by and that was all that mattered to the dog. I've noticed about cats and dogs that once they've seen something, they've seen it. They don't dwell on it. I'm wondering where the line is drawn between doing something, like throwing a rock into a pond, the act itself being a fact, and everything after that, the telling of it, is fiction by way of being held in a memory and told in words to make a picture. Even a minutely detailed picture told in words by Annie Dillard or Robbe-Grillet is not the thing itself. There are ways of telling it, like poetry, prose, visual painting, film, and interpretations for every house of the zodiac and beyond. Interpretations are like snowflakes and rocks, no two alike.



It becomes more intriguing that in the genetic setup at the beginningless beginning is for no two anything to be alike, possibly even to electrons. We have a sky with an infinite number of stars, and the advances in astronomy that reach way out into the universe find no two of those dots in the sky is exactly alike. Sand on the beaches; no two grains of sand the same. I've imagined a room full of Maine Coone cats and one of them Caterpillar; I don't believe I could pick her out on my own without speaking her name to see which one responds. And while they all look the same to me, down in there among them, they are very different from each other. The now is fleeting to the point that the word fleeting puts chains around its meaning and slows it way down, just by the nature of being after the fact, after that nanosecond of now that becomes so narrow a line as to become a mist then nothing.

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