Forfatter: Jacob Gammelgaard

The Wren

155.    Nimble, leafy brown, earthbound thing,
        The tail erect, the rear held high,
        A short dash across the forest floor;
        Strength ticking inside the bird.

156.    Her heart beats in a rush of blood
        Hundreds of times each minute.
        She moves in whips and thrusts;
        Eye-popping power on thin legs.

157.    She cuts time sequences to shreds,
        Jumps here and suddenly there;
        Something's amiss, a choppy vision,
        She moves about in skips and starts.

158.    Her metabolism is so high
        You would think the bird’s aboil.
        She must feed without pause
        Her runaway miniature body.

159.    As a wren incarnated
        I write a novel each morning,
        Devour a Sainsbury a day,
        Run to Rome and back in a week.

160.    But that’s just idle thought;
        I would collapse from heart failure
        Within the first few minutes; dead
        From exhaustion, stress and cold.

161.    I will never even come close
        In energy, athletics and appetite,
        In mental prowess, in courage,
        In heart beat, in biological clock.

162.    But she has taken to my grounds,
        Finds food under the garden oaks.
        I know her song; I see her often:
        A tarantella, a whip and she’s gone.


New in Index Ten Thousand:
Power • 155,  Heart • 156, Time sequence • 157, Metabolism: bird • 158, Run • 159,  Cold • 160, Biological clock • 161, Energy: wren • 162, Tarantella • 162,

Wittgenstein’s Garden (2)

895.    Herbal garden and kitchen greens
           facing south over the river.
        Monks living in cloister stone,
           mortar and rectangular systems.
        People with a special urge
           for the laying of paths.

896.    Monks weeding the garden,
           Mumbling among the roots.
        Spreading words among worts;
           let the ants take them.
        Many hundred years here
           at Hütteldorf Monastary.

897.    A garden assistant, just arrived,
           lives in the garden shed.
        Hard to tell man from tool,
           stiff arms, good grip.
        Self-conversing during the day
           garden gnome at night.

898.    On his knees out there,
           talking level to the ground
        Fingers loosening clay and soil
           rubbing hardened clumps.
        Fingertips on flower colours,
           nursing, digging, playing

899.    Vos colours are tangible
           on the skein, in the petals.
        Yellow is hard, blue is brittle,
           red trembles, green trickles
        Ve mix colours, mix veself,
           ve suck up colours.

900.    This cultivator of dictionaries
           and wielder of tools,
        With soil under his nails
           and colours on his fingers;
        All the words that crumble
           in the encounter with plants.


In the summer of 1920, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) took a job as a gardening assistant in the Hütteldorf Monastary, Austria, perhaps by way of therapy. Almost nothing is known of this episode. Wittgenstein’s essay Remarks on Colour was published posthumously in 1971.


New in Index Ten Thousand:
River • 895, Path-construction • 895, Wort • 896, Arm • 897, Dig  898, Green  899, Word • 900,

Wittgenstein's Garden (1)

78.    The deer is a frozen play of colours in the frosty morning. Ears turn and eyes stare; vigilance ticking between us.

79.    The only motion is the greywhite vapour from the nightblack nostrils as the lungs pump under the coat of fur; one second, two seconds, three.

80.    Greenish, yellowish, brownish, greybrown, reddish brown, algae green, yellowish green, blackstudded, greyish, browngrey, whitestreaked, greyyellow, orangeblack, bluegreen, and yellowed red colours float frostcoated in the clear air. 

81.    This is the deer. I step out to meet it.

82.    I cannot hold colours in my hand, but I can touch them as part of something. Colours are not things, but they are visible and can be distinguished in millions of nuances for which I have no words. Colours have qualities for which there is no proof, colours give off experience that cannot be explained.

83.    And then: fear, flight and hunger. The crunch of hooves that leap across stubs and brushwood and only the white tail tips among the trees - and the image is gone.

84.    We understand in images, we feel in colours, we grope for descriptions.


New in Index Ten Thousand:
Deer • 78, Nostril • 79, Colours • 80, Step • 81, Colours, experience of • 82, Hunger • 83, Feel • 84.

Dandelion

Ve grow in cracks, ve creep out of crevices, squeeze up between pavestones, wedge into rocks, sink taproots into the soil, spread across meadows, turn green to yellow. Ve drill into the underground, ve undermine the borders, ve fly with the wind.

Ve have followed you since you first began digging holes, since you first began raking the land. Ve encircle you, ve go around you and grow with you.

Ve are elevated as part of culture, decorated as medicinal herb, included on coats of arms, used for healing, loved in play and admired as a seed.

Ve are the best, the only, the strongest memory of a childhood under an open sky, a memory of summer with sun and sweet scents, with thick air and depth of light; a wooden cottage, a flowering meadow and a garden before the fall that never came and the paradise that never was.

Ve are a memory of life before the Umworld came, before industrialisation; untouched, before the disappointment, before the sorrow, before the compulsion, before the imposition of order, before the enforcement of regimes; then, then; a careless, love-seeking, dandelion-plucking, goldsheen-refracting, pappus-blowing, sunsoaking, insect-humming, seed-flying, husk-floating memory of what they call mercy.

Stick, stock, spear.
Sweat, spit, shit.
Piss, piss, piss.
Ha, ha, ha.

Is that you again?

With your knives and pliers, your irons, your poles and daggers, cutters, hackers, slicers, incinerators, poison guns. Armed to the gums of your teeth you go to war in the gardens, on the lawns, in the fields, primed for the killing.

But ve grow on, ve propagate by root, by shoot, ve self-replicate.

Ve are indomitable.

Ve mix the hereditary materials, ve stir the genome, ve clone veself, ve make hundreds of new subspecies, just because ve’re able to and just to fill out a patch or to move over the next hill.

Ve are sovereign survivors. Ve are the raw power of evolution visible to the naked eye.

What do you call ve:

Monkshead, vicar’s pate, doghat.
Garden cabbage, swine cabbage, hare cabbage,
French salad, mole salad.
Fleawort, liceflower, pigsnout.
Trollmilk, devil’s tit, witches’ cow.
Lionstooth, dogtooth, cocktube.
Scabieswort, hangmanswort, snotflower, bogeyleaf.
Piss-in-bed, pestwort, puffball.

Ok. Ve get it.

Want to know what ve call you:

Stinkstalk, stenchstem, forker, lawnsniveller, piss-on-all, pisspartout.

Enough. You see where this is going.

In the great vevolution on the future of um ve celebrate the reproductive strategy. An adversary must be vanquished through overwhelming reproductive force. Ve outgrow them. Ve grow faster than they can exterminate us.

Do not count vos among those who advocate the complete elimination of um. Um should be allowed to remain, in moderation. Um isn’t only dangerous, not only parasitic; ve must acknowledge that um provide certain opportunities to well-growing, fixed beings; ve mention vosselves dandelions as an example.

Hence, ve are in favour undermining activitiy.

Sow discord among the enemy (notice the growth metaphor!) Exploit their labile ideological condition. Incite them against each other. Cultivate (sic!) the divide between economy and ecology. Find allies among them. Do something green. Do something useful for them, be good for the nitrogen balance, be good for bees (um has no understanding of other kinds of insects). Be good for their health (or let them believe so.) Above all, be good at exploiting their sentimentality (like pappus-blowing) and um’s fathomless craving for images of themselves and their own happiness.

Our strength is in the arcalias, in um’s idea of primordial harmony and plenty; the urbliss.

Ve are the vegetal domain’s contribution to the collective unconscious.

Only radical symbols can save them from themselves.

Radical means root. Radical is rooted in roots.

Ok. It’s just a proposal.

Ve do not vote in favour of preserving um per se.

Even though a minimal presence should perhaps be part of the overall picture.

Regardless.

The above text is taken from my eco-fiction Aliff (2021), which may be regarded as a stand-alone prequel to the themes and poems in The Blog of Ten Thousand Things. The text Dandelion appears in the section Phytologoues, which gives voice to 10 selected plants, most if them with millennia of cohabitation with human beings. (Note: Ve and vos are used as personal pronouns for plant voices, corresponding to humans’ use of we and our. Um refers to human beings.

🇬🇧 Deceased poet as a garden phenomenon

668.   I could be cheeky and render the master himself, who in turn was cheeky in paraphrasing old Heraclitus: “Nobody can go out twice into the same garden. This applies also to churchyards.” *) 

669.   Here we are at the very intersection of language and nature in its reduced form, where the poet and the garden both grow except on different timescales.

670.   The plant remains fixed, while the eye of the poet moves, his body moves. Herein lies a reciprocity between the slow growth and the movable; between the silent and the thinking.

671.   The poet says that a conversation arises out of this reciprocity, precisely because the garden is in a continuous correspondence with nature, while the poet himself is in correspondence with other languages and poets. A conversation is never alone.

672.   Throughout life, the garden is in constant growth with its poet, who trims and grows with it, but later declines and passes away.

673.   This takes us to the second sentence of the paraphrase: the churchyard where the poet is buried in a severely reduced and to free nature hyper-polemical restricted form of garden, in which only few conversations can be held.

674.   I could be cheeky again and put up a sign, a cross, a stick in my garden with the epitaph of the poet. But that would probably only lead to trouble with the family, the authorities, with the municipality, maybe even with the truth.

675.   I could plant a bush in his memory. A spindle for example. Discrete, of course. Only a few would ever know. But one would understand that he is here, growing underfoot, standing up here, in conversation, fully blossomed as his own language phenomenon.

676.   Thus, the conversation may continue. Imperceptibly, behind our backs. At any time. Never alone. Per Højholt † 2004. Stand in peace.


*) Per Højholt (1928-2004), Haven som sproglig foreteelse, in Stenvaskeriet, 1994.

🇬🇧 Paean to multitudes

1363.   In multitudes the land shall live 

with all beings endowed with the right exist and to teem as far as their abilities and genomes permit them in an abundance of ways and forms and species that arise from the common multitudes and perish again as part of the earth’s endless churning of land, sea, weather and climate in a stable rate of extinct species per one million years.

1364.   In multitudes the sea shall fill

with glossy fish, side by side, belly against fin, that abound in fiords and throng in sounds and bays, fill the rivers and cover the floor of the sea, reefs, underwater rocks and bars with colors, crayfish, shrimp, plants, anemones, algae, plankton, and krill that shine like star-studded skies in the depths of the sea, while whales sing from ocean to ocean.

1365.   In multitudes the soil shall be nourished

by bacteria, amoeba, cells, microfauna, springtails, beetles, worms, by more forms of life than anywhere else on earth; the sweetly smelling, dark, crumbling, moist, crawling enzymepotent soil; with plant roots, tree roots, water, minerals, a protected and undisturbed thousand year layer of fertiliser, energy and life.

1366.   In multitudes the air shall be sated

with treks of birds in patterns, formations, flocks, made dense by starlings, traversing cranes, watched by eagles, brimming with songbirds, seabirds, wading birds, beach-birds, fowls, swallows, bats, clouds of butterflies, hoverflies, dragonflies, millions of species of insects: muscular, breathing, flying beings on trillions and more trillions of winged pairs.

1367.   In multitudes the darkness shall abound

With ten thousand species of moths, nightwings, owls, insects, mice, rodents, snakes, and predators that live by night vision, by sense of smell, by hearing; with birds in flight across the night sky under moonlight, on the magnetic rays of the earth; everything that lives and fills out this world, that we don't see, but when the morning comes, soundless, full of light, they shall all be counted and known.

1368.   In multitudes the water shall flow

with aquatic plants, crayfish, nymphs, frogs, birds, minnows, perch, pikes, salmon, water rats, beavers; with riverbanks protected deep into the adjoining land and covered with woods and meadow grass, bushes, perennial plants, with snow and ice, running clean every spring.

1369.   In multitudes the day shall grow

large and wide open, formed of living landscapes, stones, and rocks generous of meaning, of coasts and lagoons and fiords that are present with us and merged with our senses; with hills, valleys, mountains and rain and clouds in their own dignities, shiny and changeable, but forever the same; of towns, houses, and all of us, bound to the earth and water and grass and trees and leaves, the particles of our organismes and the colours and images of our thoughts, that grow out into the multitudes of the day and are recreated every night in the growth of our dreams.

1370.   In multutudes the land shall saved

by returning half of the land to the free multitudes, by banning all fishing and combustion engines from half the coastal waters, by protection all lakes, all streams, all rivers together with zones of multitudes stretching hundreds of meters along all banks, all shores, and by protecting all coasts, set them free for multitudes by removing thousands of poisons from agriculture and gardening, by removing fertilisers from all open fields, reduce animal farming to a size that can be raised freely, by protecting all bogs, prohibit the sale of spagnum and replace it all with compost, by protecting all wetlands, stopping the pumps, by replacing all plastic wrap with cellulose film, by restricting the number of farming animals, levying an common import tariff on all meat for consumption, by subsidising costs of decent food, by closing and substituting the depraved meat- fur- and cage industry, by remultituding the near-dead fields with all the forms of life that soil, water and air can sustain.

1371.   In multitudes the earth shall rise again

if nothing happened and nothing changed; after extinction, poisoning, flooding, darkening, lava, meteors; after the last oil is burnt, the last gas is wasted, the last city is destroyed, that last animal is killed, the last tree is felled, the last wrecks have rusted away, the last rays have faded; then multitudes of new species, able to live in the new atmosphere, on the barren land, will return; and then we may say: gods and spirits, peace to them, let the multitudes come, amen.


New in Index Ten Thousand:
Multitudes ◦ 1363, Sea bed ◦ 1364, Krill ◦ 1364, Amoeba ◦ 1365, Fertiliser ◦ 1365, Ocean birds ◦ 1366, Bat ◦ 1366, Rodent ◦ 1367, Night vision ◦ 1367, Crayfish ◦ 1368,  Meadow grass ◦ 1368, Valley ◦ 1369, Lagoon ◦ 1369, Half the land ◦ 1370, Meat- and fur industry ◦ 1370, Artificial fertiliser ◦ 1370,  Spagnum ◦ 1370, Extinction ◦ 1371,  Atmosphere ◦ 1371,

In memory of Thorkild Bjørnvig (1918-2004) and in particular the poem The Hope from his collection of poems Monkey Goods (1981), whence the following quote:

"May that law be written
as a law for society. The law on the right to multitudes on islands and steppes, in rain forests, waden seas, hedges, under roof ridges - the right of plants and animals to be here on their own premises, not just as materially
Indispensable, as entertainment, devoured until they are literally used up."

(my translation)

🇬🇧 Compass and Cryptochromes

I - A nest of robins

1294.   Yesteryear, a mild and early summer,
        Flowerboxes in bloom on the facade;
        Right under my study window
        A box of new pelargonias.
        I was just feeling the plants
        My fingers around the roots,
        Because it feels good, and then:
        Suddenly something alive, downy,
        Pulsating and warm to the touch
        Hidden in there: a robin’s nest.

1295.   I confess, I had seen something,
        When I stood by the window:
        A quick flicker, a brown shadow,
        Perhaps af flapping of wings,
        So, I did know something was there,
        No, someone; but a nest?
        It didn’t occur to me,
        Even if it should have;
        Dolus eventualis, they say:
        Throw that match, give that shrug;
        Mess around that flowerbox, so what?
        Let happen that which happens.

1296.   Robin chicks, four, five of them,
        Scuttled away in panic,
        Dropped from the ledge to the ground,
        Spread out into hiding, disappeared.
        The robin mother calling,
        Plaintive, I assume, desperate,
        I should think; and me, careless,
        Destroyed that years brood;
        Clumsy, stupid, culpable.

II - Trek south

1297.   Only a third would survive
        The first trek to North Africa
        And the flight back here again:
        Shot by hunters, fleeced by crows,
        Poisoned by peasants, eaten by cats,
        Gobled by owls, smashed by machines,
        Dead from exhaustion and lost,
        Diverted by radio frequencies,
        Lethal traps of light pollution,
        Glass facades and glittering cities,
        Robbed of food and resting places;
        Every year billions perish.
        But still, some of them survive
        The first trek, now more experienced,
        With landscapes, contours and
        The highlights of the route etched
        In their one-gram brains.

1298.   With thanks to robins
        We now know, roughly,
        After ten thousand years,
        How birds navigate the globe.
        The answer is magnificent, I think,
        Like also the science,
        The imagination, the inventiveness
        That made it possible;
        In short, all that empathy,
        That makes wonder into science,
        And science into poetry.

III - The navigation of birds

1299.   Birds, all of them apparently,
        Can navigate around the globe
        On the earths' geomagnetic fields.
        They sense direction and position
        By picturing the geomagnetic field
        With an accuracy of a few inches
        Across thousands of miles. 
        
1300.   Robins have been studied
        For more than half a century;
        Enclosed in cages and containers,
        Turned, rattled and moved,
        Radiated with magnetic fields,
        Subjected to illumination in
        Blue, yellow, green and red.
        Blindfolded, anaesthesised,
        Exposed to radio waves,
        Magnets upended north and south
        But robins didn’t care,
        Tissue samples extracted,
        Stacks of biochemical diagrams.
        This is what they found:

1301.   Robins have a sense, more than one,
        That perceives geomagnetism,
        An extremely weak impuls of energy,
        Many millions times less
        Than it was thought possible
        To detect with organic senses;
        But it is certain that they can.

1302.   Studies shows that the “compass” of robins
        Has no north-south polarity
        As the human technical compass;
        A self-projecting concept
        About other animals’ sence of direction.
        No, robins perceive the inclination
        Of the geomagnetic waves
        From pole to geomagnetic equator;
        It’s an inclination compass!
        Robins perceive the angle
        Of the geomagnetic waves
        Bearing towards or away from
        The magnetic equator,
        Where the angle is zero.
        Thus, the robins know
        In which direction to fly.

1303.   Robins can also detect
        The strength of the magnetic field,
        Which is strongest at the poles
        And weakest at the equator,
        Infinitely weak, in fact,
        Measured in mili- or microtesla,
        Weaker that the magnetism
        Under a high voltage cable,
        Weaker than the murmur of electrons
        In the body of the bird itself.

1304.   By knowing magnetic intensity
        Robins can find their position
        Along a north-south axis.
        Jointly with the other compass -
        The inclination of magnetic waves,
        Which indicates direction -
        Bird can perceive something close
        To a latitude and longitude.

1305.   Where there is external stimuli,
        There needs be a receiver.
        Hence, for years, they looked
        For the robins' magneto-receptors;
        What are they, where are they, and
        How do they work?

IV - Cryptochromes

1306.   From quantum mechanics is known
        A phenomenon called radical pairs:
        Two molecules exchange electrons
        And thus change their electrical charge.
        When a radical pair is formed
        The molecuels begin to spin,
        Either in parallel or opposite.
        Thus, two electrical states occur:
        State at rest and state of signal.
        A radical pair changes states
        Millions of times in microseconds.
        The spin, we now know, is affected
        By the geomagnetic field.

1307.   Researchers formulated af theory
        An epiphany, in fact, in the ‘80s,
        That radical pairs are the key
        To robins’ geomagnetic sense:
        And because the radical pair
        Requires light to be formed,
        It must be in the eye of the bird.

1308.   In the year 2000 researchers proposed
        That the receptor is a molecule
        In the eye of the robin and other birds.
        This protein, called a cryptochrome,
        Forms radical pairs in a spin
        When hit by rays of light.
        The theory holds that magnetic waves
        Affects the spin of the radical pair
        In parallel and opposite directions.
        The spin creates electrical impulses,
        That send on-off signals to
        A biochemical signalling function,
        Which can be seen as a “lever”
        On the outside of the cryptochrome.

1309.   Cryptochromes occur in birds eyes
        At the tip of the optical rods.
        As the cryptochromes spread
        Across the arch of the retina
        The bird can “see” the direction
        Of incoming magnetic waves. 
        In the same way that animals and birds
        Detect direction with a pair of ears.

1310.   Researchers have explained biochemically
        How radical pairs in the cryptochromes
        Fire off neuro-transmitted impulses
        To the optical centres in the birdbrain.
        There, we must believe, the robin,
        In a way that we might never know,
        Is able to “see” the earth's magnetic field;
        This “vision” or this “image” or
        This sensory perception is a “map”
        That the bird will need
        To find its way, to know the route;
        A “map” in the form of light? shapes?
        Pixellated fields? Wavy lines?
        A “map” that fits the “compass”:
        Memorised routes, main landmarks
        Or something quite different; spectres of light,
        Ultraviolet or infrared, or maybe
        Magnetic properties in the landscape.
        Everything is possible.

1311.   Birds have developed other senses
        For use in their navigation:
        The beaks of birds contain magnetite,
        The most magnetic mineral known.
        Biochemical processes in the beak
        Sends neuro-transmitted signals
        To part of the bird’s brainstem;
        Here, maybe, is the neurologial path
        To sensing geomagnetic intensity.

1312.   For certain, birds also use vision,
        Smell, memory, experience,
        Mountains, seas, coastlines,
        Maybe sound, temperature, wind,
        Maybe a fifth or sixth method
        Of sensing place and direction.

V. A larger world

1313.   A new insight, a larger world,
        That will become as natural
        To my children and grandchildren,
        As the the "compass needle" of birds
        Was to me, when, as a boy
        I watched the swallows leave.

1314.   To a brood of robin chicks
        Endowed with global gifts
        They never lived to use;
        Inadvertently destroyed,
        Stroeby Beach, summer of 2022.
        In memory.

During the past 75 years, a large number of researchers have contributed to the accumulated knowledge on the navigation of birds using the earth's geomagnetic field. It is impossible for me to mention them all here; but let me point to a few whose articles have been a gift for me to read: Klaus Schulten, Thorsten Ritz, Henrik Mouritsen, Peter Hore, W. Wiltschko, R. Wiltschko.

Ed Yong An Immense World (2022) is a superb introduction to the sensory perceptions of living beings and I warmly recommend it to everyone. The book's chapter on the ability of birds for optical navigation using the earth's geomagnetic field furnished me with knowledge and inspiration for the poem above.  


New in Index Ten Thousand:
Robin's nest ◦ 1294, Flowerbox ◦ 1295, Brood ◦ 1296, Cat: domestic ◦ 1297, Light pollution ◦ 1297, Robin ◦ 1298, Science ◦ 1298, Earth's geomagnetic field ◦ 1299, Radio waves ◦ 1300, Impulse ◦ 1301, Equator ◦ 1302, Electron ◦ 1303, Compass ◦ 1304, Magneto-receptor ◦ 1305, Radical pair ◦ 1306, Electrical charge ◦ 1306, Geomagnetic sense ◦ 1307, Chryptochrome ◦ 1308, Magnetic waves ◦ 1308, Rods: eye ◦ 1309, Landmarks ◦ 1310, Visual centre ◦ 1310, Navigation ◦ 1311, Sense of direction ◦ 1312, A larger world ◦ 1313, Gifts ◦ 1314.

🇬🇧 Spider on a Headstand

376.  A spider weaves its web
      Above the headstand one day;
      We lie beneath, watching.

377.  I think: A net to catch imaginations;
      My love thinks: You will be pissed on.
      I say: You lack entomological knowledge.
      My love says: You lack life experience.

378.  The spider conceives of flies,
      Of eating its mate; she sees 
      Coming generations.


New in Index Ten Thousand:
Spiderweb • 376, Imagination • 377, Mate: spider • 378

🇬🇧 On the pattern in a stand of nettles 

142.    A stand of nettles grows up on exposed soil along the fence. Here are flickers of sun and effects of shadow. Here is the smell of soil, the air is mild. The colours are yellowish, green, delicate green, almost white.

143.   The stand is sligtly rounded with the highest stalks in the middle. The height decreases evenly towards the sides, about one meter at its highest and with a circumference of about three adult pathoms.

144.   The stalks are slender, edged and strait, and stand in visible mutual distance, a good hundred of them on subterranean tubers.

145.   Wonderful parataxis! The leaves sit in pairs in rising and descending spirals on the upper part of the stalk. Not one leaf touches another. All stalks are turned to avoid all other stalks and leaves across the entire sunfacing surface of the stand in a green, sharp-toothed pattern.

146.   This pattern has no exact reptitions, no definite form. It weaves, waves, approaches, deviates, turns, angles and fills out all illuminated space in three dimensions. The stalks sway, a breath of air stirs, but the formation of the leaves is maintained.

147.   Remove one leaf, just one, and the unity is destroyed. Everything is fitted in, calibrated and adapted to sunlight and the dispersion daylight. A perfect, serrated harmony.

148.   We have no word for the reciprocal, dynamic placement of leaves determined by location, height, aspect, light, landscape and moisture.

149.   But we might call it the energy in a collective of plants. We might call it the ability of the stand of nettle to arrange itself spatially in a given place under given conditions.

150.   We might call it a manifestation of an organic principle and expression of Zhang Zai’s concept of li, the force that determines the shape and character of all things. We might say, that this li applies also to individuals acting in coordination.

151.   We might say, that li creates a complex aesthetic expression that is discernible to us humans.

152.   Because we are bound by the ineluctable modality of the visible. Harmony lies in the eye and cannot be conceived in words.

153.   I put away language. I remove my clothes and stand naked in front of the nettles. I am not aesthetic, certainly not beautiful, but roughly symmetrical, functional, and dangerous.

154.   Now we are equal, the two of us. My skin against your sawteeth, my symmetry against your harmony. My evil against your poison. I hold out my hand. My image. My brother **). 

*) Zhang Zai (1022-1077) was a significant Neo-confucian philosopher and metaphysian during the Song Dynasty.

**) In memory of Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), Les Flerus du Mal, 1857.

New in Index Ten Thousand:
Nettles • 142, Stalk • 143, Tuber • 144, Surfacing • 145, Parataxis • 145, Pattern • 146, Harmony • 147, Breath of air • 147, Moisture • 148, Energy: plant collective • 149, Li • 150, Aesthetic • 151, Eye • 152, Symmetry: Homo s.• 153, Evil • 154.

🇬🇧 Grey Morning Before Rain

Sounds and air fall
To the ground. Silence.
Movements sink down
To the ground. Silence.
Trees falter and halt,
Plants pause.

The crust of earth,
Fungus, humusfibres
Heavenward, waiting.
Bacteria hesitate,
Beetles, millipedes stop,
Roottips open up.

Daylight sinks, grayish,
Covers the ground.
Reflections fade
Colors turn flat.
Depth and effect
Plain, effaced.

Only smells augment,
Cool, viscous.
The inner zone
Closest to the body
Expands, absorbs,
Wind from the sea.

Smell and tast mingle,
Mold and cool moisture;
The umami of air condenses.
Air exhaled inhaled,
Vapour exchange soundless,
Waiting.

No mechanics,
No machines,
No metaphors.
Timeless.
Heavy moisture breaks.
Rain.

🇬🇧 The Umwelt of the Gardenspider Spawn

301.   The garden spider’s
       Clump of spawn:
       Pinhead yellow bodies,
       Black behinds.

302.   Hatched in a sack
       Of golden buds
       Suspended on straws,
       A bush or flowercups.

303.   Come closer,
       Pluck a string:
       Golden spots spread
       On silky threads.

304.   Floating movements
       Suspended in oil;
       Viscous slo-mo,
       A silent explosion.

305.   The spidersphere
       Dispersed one final time
       Across swinging bridges
       Towards the sunset.

🇬🇧 Tanbark Beetle

661.   She who has seen a tanbark beetle
       Is a lucky critter:
       Wingcovers are shiny bluish-green.
       Long, segmented antennas,
       A full bodylenght long
       Finely balanced down and across
       Bulging black droplets of muscle
       On reddish upper thighs,
       Brownish-yellow thorax
       And a small black head.

662.   We experience in glimpses
       We see in sequences
       Few seconds in duration.
       Our attention 
       Is mostly blind.
       But now and the
       The moment is propituous
       And we see; really see.

663.   The tanbark beetles is there
       Suddenly among the logs,
       Completely alive, shy,
       But not afraid.
       Just watchfull.
       Half a minute
       And she scurries off;
       Finds shelter and lays eggs
       In my stack of firewood.

664.   I relish the moment.
       A small performance
       In the unending variation
       Of insect- and beetlelife.

665.   Life is expansive
       And my empathy with beetles
       Has grown a little.
       This is what I call
       An expanded day.

666.   I add the barkborers name
       To the common mailbox
       Of species on my lot.
       A pedestrian passes by, looks,
       Asks me: “Tell me, what’s that, will ya.
       I reply: “Awh, just practical biophilia.

🇬🇧 The Blackbird’s (half) mid-morning nap

688.    He’s settled in a sycamore
        A quiet mid-morning
        Hidden by the leaves.
        I think he’s dozing.
        The body is still,
        The head sinks down,
        The neck withdrawn into the body.
        The eyelids close up,
        (It's’ a bird!).

689.    The blackbird sleeps,
        Or dozes, or something else,
        At least on one side,
        Just like the swifts,
        It is believed.
        Maybe the other side is awake,
        But I don’t think I’ll ever see it.

670.    If nothing else, I see
        Half a bird asleep.
        The body is at rest.
        The tip of the beak is lowered.
        Dreams in one half of the brain,
        Visuals in realtime in the other?
        Can he close down hemispeherically?

671.    After a few minutes
        He raises up his head,
        Opens his beak.
        The body still calm,
        Legs pulled up under him.
        He is waking, half or whole.

672.    He scouts about
        As all birds:
        Head and neck in jerks;
        Quarter or half turns,
        First to one side,
        Then to the other side.
        Repeated, watchful.
        A minute or two.
        The eye with its yellow ring;
        The regard stiff, black.
        Here, all is silent.

673.    Branch and leaves flap,
        He’s gone.
        He wanted time
        For himself.
        A quiet moment
        In the rush of the day.
        I have spied on him.

Small crane's-bill

1286.   This fall, small crane’s-bills,
        After years of discrete growth
        Scattered in the summer garden,
        found a breakthrough as brawns.

1287.   Breaking out of the garden asylum
        The crescent shape flowerbed
        Around the small appletree
        For worts and perennials in exile
        Threatened on their growth
        In cancelled gardens.
 
1288.   First, they took the flowerbed,
        A cover around the other plants:
        Burnet, orpines and mints.
        Then they grew out across the lawn,
        Close the high-mown paths.
        From there up and across old swards,
        Around the tufts of wild oregano,
        Under the small elderberry tree
        Forward among the rival groundelders and
        Spearpointed black- and boysenberry shoots.

1289.   Crept under the clothes-dryer,
        Moved along the edge of pond,
        Usurped space among the rhubarbs,
        In between the white yarrows,
        Growing freely in the tall grass,
        Extended further along the terasse
        Turned to the monastary flowerbed.

1290.   A spectacle of leaf patterns,
        Crescendo of green fertility,
        A vegetal triumph in a summer
        Divided into four parts:
        Wet, warm, parched, warm:
        An ambush of many plants
        That budded a second time,
        Like the small crane’s-bill,
        Who took it’s chance, helped by
        A planet at its tipping point,
        For an explosion of leaves
        In the enfeebled fall.

On turning a page in the works of Robert Burns.

To the Poet – from the Mouse

Ach, Rabbie, apologies accepted;
Your words ring true, you do regret it.
Tho’ mice and men remain related,
   Yet, we know the price;
After all, it is to be expected
  That men kill mice.

Rabbie, we could have had a blether,
A wee natter on life and weather.
In winter we could sit together
  By the fire warmer;
Surely, we could discourse forever,
  My fellow farmer.

Kindred minds, ay, Rabbie Burns,
That we are, and curse him that spurns
A mouse that feels and learns
  From past and present.
Wisdom, they say, is man’s gift to earn,
  But nay, it isn’t.

I shall miss the barns, the fields, the hay.
I shall even miss the owl and cat at play.
Perhaps we may return there one day,
  Poet of the land,
Before our joys and soils are blown away
  And turn to sand.

Death by scythe and death by plough
Is now death by poisons anyhow.
Fens and trees and thickets cease to grow;
  The land’s undone:
A barren scape where empty rivers flow;
  Rabbie, it’s gone.

Man’s dominion is beyond belief;
All your fears will turn to grief.
Tho’ to you it may be small relief
  That mice may then
Retake and repopulate; in brief:
  Replace all men.

Rabbie, in parting let’s rejoice
That men may one day take your advice
And stop the killing and maiming of mice.
  Think, what a feastie!
Be well, may these humble words suffice,
  Yours truly, Beastie.

(2022)

Rabbie is the Scottish nickname for Robert Burns.

This poem does not properly speaking belong to the Ten Thousand Things Blog and is too squarely placed in the Anglo-Saxon literary canon in which I was formed. But it is related in content and I see it as a one the poems that lead me to the formative idea of this blog. The poem was written in English and no Danish version exists.