HAPPY DONKEYS

jack (l) and Jenny (r) at breakfast

The donkey meadow has a green 5 o'clock shadow. Wednesday I noticed the first hint of green, Thursday a little more. Overcast and rain, then the last two days of sunlight and warm nights, the donkeys are roaming about the meadow nibbling where they can find something long enough to bite. The fresh grass must taste especially delicious to them after a long winter of eating hay. The last several mornings I have been not so careful with my fingers giving them carrots. Both Jenny and Jack have touched my fingers with their teeth in such a way they could have bit, but recognized it was my finger on contact and moved their teeth to the carrot. It showed me they have no intent to bite my fingers and I need not be protective of fingers from here on. Out in the field with them, I walk around them close enough to make them automatically wary, but they show no sign of discomfort and I feel comfortable too. I feel affirmed every time I walk close behind Jenny and she doesn't even change the rhythm of her munching. I've been careful not to surprise them. They taught me early that donkeys are wary of human arms. They're unpredictable and they grab donkeys and control them. I've never controlled them physically. I've only controlled the donkeys mentally by showing them I am interested in their well-being and appreciate the persons they are. I was told so many times in the first months to carry a stick, they'll kick me, warned repeatedly. I knew otherwise. Like the time I had three kittens two weeks old and their mother ran under a car. I went to the vet to buy formula and ask for some tips. I was told they would die. I knew they would live, but also knew he wouldn't believe me if I said it. He would see in time. Caterpillar's eighteenth birthday is coming up soon, Mother's Day. 

siesta time in the donkey meadow

The four-leggeds that have lived with me taught me their ways, their natures. I found when I allowed them to be themselves, not correct and scold them, not hit them, not talk down to them, and pay attention to their communications, the four-leggeds are benign, loving people who want to get along and be happy. Jack and Jenny are gentle and content with each other all day and all night. Sometimes when Jack brays, Jenny gets antsy, backs up to him and fake kicks him until he stops. I'm wondering if she's jealous because she can't bray like him. Her bray is a high-pitched squeal. I have the impression she is frustrated with herself. She's been trying a year and a half to get Jack's bray and it will not come to her. I'm guessing it pisses her off that Jack is such a good brayer and she can't get it; she's bigger than him and ought to be able to bray bigger too. She squeals like a hound dog in pain. She dislikes it so much she has stopped using her bray and just squeals. I do get the feeling she is intimidated by Jack's bray and resents him for it. It fits Jenny's jealous nature. I wonder, too, if the excitement seeing the Ice Cream man with morning carrots that sets Jack into a bray might excite Jenny too. She gets jealous over the Ice Cream man, wants him all to herself. Sometimes they back up to each other and have a fake kick-boxing match. Both hop up and down in back like they're kicking, but only touch each other with their back knees. It's play for them. No intent to kick or hurt. They just get excited and this is what donkeys do when they get excited. I take sweet grain to them in the mid afternoon. When it's time, they stand at the fence and bray for me. They back up to each other and pretend kick, hop up and down on the back legs, doing what donkeys do, sparring without hitting. 

jack (l) and jenny (r)

I reach over the fence to pour the grain. I like having the fence between me and them. They get rambunctious in a way that they forget everything else but the grain. Jenny will have it first. I walk the fence to the place I pour some for Jenny, her beside me, chin over the fence smelling the container, squealing, ears back. Jack is close, wants to be beside her, but she kicks and keeps him back while he squeals and groans, makes sounds like a whimpering child crying. I pour it for Jenny and she's eating before I finish pouring. She doesn't care if I pour it on her head. Next, Jack squealing and dancing, his nose to the container over the fence, crying, groaning, squealing to have his grain. I pour it for him at the same spot every day and he, like Jenny, is eating before I'm finished pouring. They're done with me. I get too close and their ears go back. I'm not afraid of them kicking me the other side of the fence. They get so excited over the grain they lose consciousness and then I'm in a donkey mosh pit. I don't see any need to train the excitement out of them. They learn my ways, I learn their ways. Rather than attempt to stop them getting excited, I just get out of the way and let them have at it. Jack is a happy spirited donkey by nature. He forgives readily and defers to his baby doll, Donkey Jen. He loves Jenny so much he's in bliss in her presence. Jenny loves him the same. They appear to me to beam in the presence of the other. My presence changes everything for them. This afternoon they were out in the meadow resting on the hay they were eating, siesta. 

jack's legs

I saw them through the window and thought Id see if I could sneak out the door and creep behind the white pine trunk as out of sight as possible. As soon as I set the camera where it could see them, Alpha Jack saw the camera and me. He went to braying. Jenny stood up, backed up to him and hopped up and down, forcing him to stop. He took off in a half gallop running to Ice Cream man for some grain. Jenny followed walking. They are as gentle with me as children. It's my love vibration that allows them to let down their defenses. I keep my arms down at my sides around them. I don't make sudden movements to frighten them. They are skittish as cats. I do with them like Jane Goodall did with the chimpanzees. The donkeys don't like to be touched by surprise. I keep my arms down and my hands to myself. I touch when they want to be touched. Today, I saw Jenny rubbing the bridge of her nose on the fencepost. I put my hand on the bridge of her nose and rubbed her where she was scratching. She wanted me to hold my hand still and she rubbed her nose on my hand where she had the itch or whatever it was she was scratching. It was fun for me to let her scratch her nose on my hand. The only place Jenny likes to be touched is on her back at the front shoulder where the stripes cross. Jack likes me to rub that spot for him too. After I rub Jenny on that spot, she likes for me to rub her neck, her spine, her rump, the shoulders of her legs. She will even let me rub her legs now. Touching legs was off limits for a long time. Jack loves to have his legs rubbed. Jenny will let me rub her legs after seeing me rub Jack's legs. She gets jealous and wants the same for herself. I like the love energy that flows around us the times of day we're together. It makes us gentle with each other.  

feisty donkeys

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GOODBYE, DRAGON INN THE MOVIE

Turned the laptop on after seeing a film I have a hard time finding anything to say about. It would take an ocean of things to say or nothing. Made in Taiwan by director, Tsai Ming-liang. I'd seen three other films by him, all of them telling me I want to see any I had not yet seen. This one came to the top of my netflix Q today, Goodbye, Dragon Inn. It was a brave film to make. I can't imagine how he found a producer. It was the ultimate anti-action film made around an action film from 1967, Dragon Inn, a Chinese (Taiwan) kung-fu sword-fight version of a Japanese samurai film. The film mostly happens inside an old movie theater in Taipei, its last night open. This was closing night. Half a dozen people in the theater. They're watching Dragon Inn. The film amounts to a series of still scenes inside the theater with someone moving through the scene, or not. A woman with a brace of some sort on her leg walks throughout the theater looking for the projectionist to give him something to eat. She never finds him. We look at the different individuals in the theater, watch them watch the movie. The camera work is worth mention. A couple times looking down the aisle of steps between the rows of seats, the steps will be going almost straight up on the screen. It doesn't seem unusual. It seems like the film was a review of the inside of the theater, looking at it from outside, seeing how once the theater was important, and by closing night in 2003, it had become irrelevant, showing kung-fu slasher films. The stillness throughout the film was not boring. Each scene had a quiet tension, wondering if something might happen in the scene. Never does. Brief word exchanges happened a few times. 

One guy tried to pick up another guy in a hallway. The guy he tried to pick up told him the theater was known to be haunted, had ghosts, and walked away. Watched the woman with the leg problem walk throughout the theater. One shot looked at the shadow cast by the vertical bars of a stair rail for a long time, listening to the woman climb the steps, one at a time, until she reached the level with the camera, came into view and slowly walked out of the scene. One of the half dozen in the seats was an old man sitting alone. Tears ran down his cheeks. Another old man was there with a child of about three. Sometimes a scene in the movie, acrobatic spinning dances with flowing robes and quick swords, shouting in Chinese. The soundtrack of the film is heard in the background in all the scenes throughout the building. The film playing, Dragon Inn, is always in the air. A film with as little action as a Japanese garden mixed with a kung-fu action movie. The flickering on the screen is a movie within a movie, the action generating no emotional commitment, the same as looking down an empty hallway for a long time, waiting for something to happen, and nothing happens. It's not frustrating. Right away, I caught onto the rhythm of the film, which did remind me of a documentary I saw once of Japanese gardens, action in stillness. In this way, it felt like the director's attitude was reverential toward the theater, sad to see it end. The lights came on, everyone was gone. Out front, the two old men recognized each other. They were actors in the 1967 film, living in Taipei, who came to see it perhaps the last time, the one bringing his grandbaby. They spoke briefly and stood still, looking back at the entrance to the theater.

The projectionist and the woman with the leg I took for his wife, tie up the loose ends, closing the theater, turning off the water to the urinals in the men's room, turning out lights, closing up for the last time. Curiously, by the end of a film in which nothing happens, I'd become acquainted with the half dozen people in the theater and the two people working the theater. It is a film so beautiful I'd like to recommend it to my film-watching friends, but when I think about who I know can sit through a movie in which nothing at all happens, it comes down to Lucas and Judy Carpenter. I feel like I have been in the presence of pure art, art for art's sake. If I didn't have the race to watch tomorrow, I'd see it again. I googled Tsai Ming-liang, director, to see what other films he'd made. I'd seen them all. This was the last of his I had not seen. At the end, I saw previews of three of his other films. I enjoyed reviewing them, remembering liking them all as much as Goodbye, Dragon Inn. One, The River, was among the strangest films I've ever seen, and among the most beautiful. Again, nothing much going on in Hong Kong where the weather is tropical. People sit around, walk around, ride around. And then one surprise moment in silence that could never be spoken of, but never forgotten. The movie goes on like before, but everything is different. Tsai Ming-liang, the director, has a subtle mind, so subtle I don't understand how he finds a producer. His films are not about making money. They're about winning international film awards, good marketing for a film that only shows in art theaters. Though every scene was shot by a still camera, like a still photograph, on one wall, or hallway, or in the rows of seats, each frame was a work of art in its composition and colors, like a wall-sized abstract or surrealist painting. Then someone walks through it, or stands in it, or sits in it.

The film seemed to me in the "school" of minimalism in cinema. It was as simple as stacked blocks of wood by Carl Andre, or tiles on the floor that a sign on the wall in the Museum of Modern Art invites you to walk on. The film was a series of beautiful compositions of plain spaces lasting half a minute or more. I never got bored, was never restless wondering when it will be over. I was held by the suspense of an empty space, an essentially abstract backdrop and people passing through it. I've been longing for a really good Chinese film I've not yet seen. This one was it. The trailers, previews, of Tsai Ming-liang films in the special features brought back memories of each one, making me want to see them again. I've seen too many straight-forward movies for awhile, needed one to hold me like this one did in its indirectness. The last three movies I've seen, before Goodbye, Dragon Inn, I had to take a nap half way into them. Good films, but slow, making me want to crank up the metronome. And this one today, so slow it stood still, I never looked at the clock one time. Never got the first case of jitters wanting this thing to move on, get in motion. Like a piece of music, it moved forward through time visually. This is one of the many aspects of netflix I love. I see a film I love, look for others by the same director, and I can have a film festival of movies I love. Will see Romanian films for the next couple weeks. I understand they're depressing, but don't care. Like Latvian films, Ukrainian films, Mongolian films, a look at life behind the Iron Curtain, to see how the people lived in the places we had little to no news about. I found Soviet satellite countries severely depressed, both economically and psychologically. The Soviet system, I can only assess from what I've seen, dismantled the cultures of the people in these countries. The stories show people having a slow time getting culture going again. The Soviet occupation made them dependent, then dumped them all overnight with strings attached. I love tapping into cultures around the globe by way of film. This one, Goodbye, Dragon Inn, rang my chimes. 

tsai ming-liang, director

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LEGACY THE ILLUSION

marcel janco

I was looking at the Monet paintings posted in yesterday's writing a few minutes ago, imagining taking a tour of his lily pond and big outdoor garden he created for an environment to paint in. I was thinking of the expense of hiring the work done, a considerable amount of money, remembering he was quite well off in his later years, the grand old man of Parisian art, whose paintings sold for huge prices. It occurred to me another reason he made the garden was for his legacy, something on the ground, living, to be his land down through time, preserved as an outdoor museum. His body would expire, though his name, Claude Monet, will live as the painter of some beautiful works, creator of a garden of equal beauty. He consciously created his legacy as he designed his garden with paths and footbridges after the Japanese style. This put me into thinking about some of my peers, who think about and plan for their legacy. The times peers have asked about my legacy, I could only say, I have none and want none. One had an arrangement made that his land will never be used for development. My thought on the matter: so what. For myself, I don't want the illusion of control in the future beyond my time. I don't want my name on a bridge. I don't want kids expected to memorize bullshit factoids about my life for school. I'll be leaving a house full of things important to me that become junk the moment of my demise. I am assured there will be no circling buzzards. I don't have anything anybody wants. Books, art and music. Buzzards want money and things with money value. All I'll leave is a mess for somebody else to clean up without any idea what to do with it. "Know somebody wants a bookshelf?" "No. Grandma might could use it to put her knickknacks on." 

marcel janco

One of my peers is dashing about, belonging to this and that civic do-good outfit, contributing to the community, name and picture in the paper, footprints on the beach. Michelangelo left his legacy in marble. Big difference. Shakespeare has been known down through time until this time, over five hundred years. His face is about the same as a computer icon, like Einstein's face. Great men. Who cares what either of them did? Names to memorize for a test. Charles Darwin was a:  1) Chinese poet, 2) folk song railroad engineer, 3) biological scientist, 4) Sixties guitar hero. When it comes to people who have left the legacy of legacies, like Darwin bringing in a new cosmology, Bill Monroe bringing in a new form of music, Shakespeare and Michelangelo, icons of the Renaissance, timeless names, they end up as answers to test questions. And that's as good as legacy gets, one more name to bore kids in school out of their minds memorizing for the test. Looking at the state of civilization now, I've become convinced we are collectively at the end of this round of civilization. I don't even want a tombstone. I don't want to take up ground with a coffin inside an underground vault, encased in steel for millennia to keep out the worms. A grave is what we of Western Civ leave for a legacy, and I don't even want to leave a grave. I want my ashes strewn in the woods. I want my remains at least to be bone meal in the topsoil, the only legacy I have an interest in leaving. Ego would like to think I have something to contribute to the future, but I don't. The idea of a legacy appears to me a symbolic attempt not to die. A portrait hanging in the courtroom didn't extend his life one minute. My friend Bill Pruitt told me one day when we were out in the field working with chainsaws, he didn't want nothin said at his funeral but, he done the best he knowed how. 

marcel janco

I can't leave out the peer who kept his obituary in his filing cabinet, adding to it as time went by, long enough to fill a full page in a major city newspaper. He died. I don't know if the obituary made it into the paper, considering his widow would have to mortgage the house to pay for it. I assume an edited version went into the paper. Don't know. Don't care. Thought it was gross when he told me about it, I sure don't want to see it. He sent me a copy in a big manila envelope. I never opened it. This is the legacy of the high school annual. The ones with the longest list of activities under their senior pictures win. Win what? Then there is the legacy of assets. None of it ever appealed to me as something I'd want. I've known enough people who died to understand that when it's over, it's over. No going back. No changing anything. Nothing left but to rewrite history. It seems to me it's the nature of the flow that is life. God is the creator, sustainer and destroyer. We are born, live our lives and die. Everything in this world of duality has its beginning, its time as a form, and its end. It seems like wanting to leave a part of self to endure past one's death date is out of tune with this flow that is the nature of everything, life itself. It took me a long time to be comfortable with this cycle that includes dying. It seems now like I get comfort from the cycle itself. I used to wonder why a loving God would create a world where everything has to kill to live. Coyotes kill a calf because they're hungry. What about the sanctity of life? I wondered about it until finally I saw killing to live the only way a self-sustaining world can make it. I can't get comfortable with the thought of wanting to control anything beyond my time in the body. The only thing I have asked or will ask about the future beyond my last day is the donkeys, Jenny and Jack, not be separated. It's not an absolute. Just something to make me feel better now, believing they have a good chance of living their lives til death do them part. I can't even imagine a legacy beyond now. I can't even concern myself with memories I'll leave with different people I know. It's not my concern. Mine is to live my life and that is all. It's the same if I do something memorable or not.

marcel janco

My feeling is the will to leave a legacy is a measure of one's fear of death. I could say these blog writings are my legacy, but I don't see it so. They are for the writing itself, only. I don't know that the internet will be available from one day to the next. The future I see for humanity is the end of this round of civilization is upon us. Not an end as an explosion, but a slow fade that picks up speed the closer it gets. The civilization to replace it has already begun, though it will have come from inside this civilization, like minimalism and pop art had their seed inside abstract expressionism. Pop and minimalism kept the cycle in motion revealing abstract expressionism not to be the final goal of Art. Civilization goes on changing and art expression changes with it. The next round of civilization will fade seamlessly out of the old ways into the new. I imagine a century from now will look back at now as relevant as we look at Egyptian civilization. As fire was the basis of the last round of civilization, electricity is central to the new, which has already begun. Humans may have to move underground to survive the burn-off of vegetation on the earth's surface and the dying oceans. We can generate electricity for lights to grow food by and generate oxygen while creating bigger and bigger underground spaces as time goes by. Civilization under ground will be very different from civilization above ground. Our records now are in computer clouds, dependent on an uncertain internet. It kind of looks like the legacy of this round of civilization presently ending will be a legacy of self-destruction, the whole surface of the earth desert. I can only see any legacy I might leave the same as footprints in the sand.

marcel janco himself

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IN THE FLOW ON AIR BELLOWS MOUNTAIN

claude monet

Overcast sky today, threatening to rain all day and never did. The forecast was for rain. I watched the rhododendron leaves out the window from time to time for sign of raindrops. At the first sign of rain I would back the car down the hill to the barn and carry three bales to the donkey feeding station before rain. I wanted to do several things before wrestling the hay, knowing when I've brought up the three bales, packed them, carried some into the meadow for donkeys, I'd be tired. Planned to carry the hay last, then have a nap. The rain never came, I stretched out on the bed and woke up. Spent half an hour wondering why I was staying in the bed when it was obvious I was not headed for sleep. To rest. I needed to rest. To lie down for half an hour is sometimes as good a rest as a nap. Working on the farm, tired, needing a break, I would lie down on my back and watch the clouds. It worked so well and so fast I learned all I needed was to watch the clouds until I saw them move. It takes a moment looking up at the clouds to see their motion. First glance, they're still. Wait just a few seconds and they start moving, rather my eyes notice. I would lie there and watch the clouds move. Ready to get up and back to work refreshed. It was a way to take a break and not waste any time while I'm working. Had a lot to do and had to keep up with it. In less than a minute I was ready to go again. It helped keep me in tune, too. A brief meditation, a clearing of the mind. Looking at clouds helps clear my mind almost instantly. In motion, I only see the clouds still. I have to be still before I can see the clouds move. Lying on my back in the meadow watching clouds is the most relaxing thing I know. I've found the air currents of the southern part of the county watching the flow of clouds.  

claude monet

The air currents here on Air Bellows mountain run every which way. I'm in a holler between two ridges, north and south, and another ridge about three hundred yards to the east that runs perpendicular to the other two, and a ridge to the west about the same distance. Sometimes the wind whips around in this oddly shaped bowl in turbulence patterns. One moment the wind will be blowing one way and another moment the wind is swirling in a different direction. Wind blowing north and south, the ridges slope the wind up over my glen. The trees on the ridges above roar like a flying train and not a leaf down here will even be moving. The wind blowing east or west runs right through here. I like to pay attention to the wind as an aspect of flow. Water flows. Blood flows. Mind flows. A turning wheel flows. Most of the time in my holler the wind does not move very fast. The location of this house is in harmony with the surrounding landscape. Just a few hundred yards to the west around a curve runs the wind channel of Air Bellows Gap. The wind flows through there in a pattern so different from the patterns around the house it seems odd it's so close. The channel is a river of air. My holler is a still pool at the side of a mountain stream, outside the current, slowly renewed by the current, a still, quiet place. The air current through Air Bellows Gap flows around a bend and follows the channel of the creek to the waterfalls, down the creek to Whitehead, then up to Fender mountain and beyond into another current. I've been told this gap was given its name Air Bellows for the wind blowing through it both ways. I like living at three thousand feet in the Southern mountains.

claude monet

Low-flying clouds creep over the mountain, fog all day. A foggy day is beautiful every time of year. Many times I have been someplace else, like Pine Swamp, the township to the east of Whitehead, and saw my mountain in the distance covered by a cloud crawling over the long ridge the Parkway follows. I have walked the ridge from the house to Bullhead and all the way out to the far end of the mountain. Walking in these mountains is how I found home here. In the early years I walked long distances with the dog, learning the deer trails, the varieties of trees, outcroppings of rock, the creeks, the waterfalls. Two of the waterfalls in Air Bellows draw visitors, but at least four other waterfalls are tucked out of the way in wooded spaces only hunters see. There are even places that are waterfalls in a big rain and not even a creek when it's not raining. There was a time the then director of the Chamber of Commerce asked me for a waterfall photograph for the cover of one of their small tourism magazines advertising local businesses. I didn't want to make the Air Bellows falls a tourist attraction. This is not a state park and people from away never get it that people own the land they're trespassing. That's not entirely true, but enough to make it seem true. I took him a photograph of a small, beautiful waterfall with a nice rock beside it, some ferns and moss around. He loved the picture. After the magazine was done, he asked me where the waterfall was. I told him it is only a waterfall during a rain and a short time after. It doesn't exist. He didn't know what to do with that. His face fell in such a way I suspected he'd been asked how to find the waterfall in the picture. I doubt he gave such an answer to the question next time. Probably said he didn't know. He was way into promoting and advertising, selling the county. I am philosophically opposed to that mind, explaining why I turned in the picture of a waterfall that is not a waterfall.

claude monet

For several years I would take a day and go to the woods with a book, a notebook, a pen, a thermos of hot tea and an apple or two. I'd go with dog to a place along the creek, a big flat rock in the creek, a flat rock beside the creek, anyplace I wanted to sit along the creek. My favorite spot was a rock that projected into the creek from the side, covered in moss, flat on top, a nice mossy bed, rhododendron, trees, a small waterfall to the right a short distance, and the creek, Waterfalls Creek, flowing down the hill to the left toward the big waterfalls farther on. Enough room on top of the rock to sit and place my things, and room for dog to stretch out behind me as I sat facing the water. She, Sadie, would explore the woods all day, coming back to me from time to time. I would mostly sit and watch the flow of the water. I have seen some rare occurrences sitting on the rock. This was in the time native trout lived in the creek, before the Christmas tree invasion that poisoned the ground and the water of Air Bellows and all the water downstream into the Little River. The springs on this mountain are the beginning of the Little River. The trout are gone, the ecosystem along the creeks is gone, the minnows, the water snakes, gone. The water is now dead. Back in the time it was living, the rock I sat on had a small pool to the right I looked down into. After sitting still for an hour, the trout came out from hiding and swam around in the pool, living their lives. This one day I saw a female trout in a shallow place where the water ran over small rocks, a male beside her. Two males took turns. One would shimmy beside her for awhile and swim out into the pool. Another male was waiting his turn and moved in to shimmy beside her. By the time he finished, the other was ready to go again. They made the round several times. After she'd shed all her eggs, she swam back and rejoined the extended family circling in the pool. Another time a water snake gave me a show of how beautifully a snake can swim. It was a swimming dance. As beautiful a thing as I've ever seen.

claude monet himself

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