Barbara Lefcowitz Poetry

WANDERING and SERENDIPITY
“The goal is always to find something new,
hopefully unimagined, and better still, unimaginable.”
–Barry Sharpless
“In the field of observation, chances favors only the prepared mind.”
–Louis Pasteur
One of these days I guess I’ll buy myself a compass.  Yet no matter how accurate its magnetic needle,  I doubt it will prevent me from getting lost.
Long ago I lost count of how many times I’ve wandered into a patch of woods, briefly followed a path set down by some previous visitor and emerged hours later only after hacking my way through thorny bushes, creating so many spiralling paths that in the end it must be the trees themselves that guided me out.  No matter how sincere my resolve that next time I will carefully adhere to a path and also note particularly patterns of bark as if they were street signs, perhaps even scatter pebbles like Gretel,  that sensible and wholly lineal young girl of the forest,  I know I will get lost again.  In fact, I am now convinced that I like to get lost and may indeed unconsciously plan to do so.
You’d think someone with such a poor sense of direction as myself would avoid the  noisy, labyrinthian markets of Asia, but I am irresistibly drawn to such places, never mind the heat and flies, the crowds, even the hustling and uncomfortable prospect of bargaining.  But even when I take the trouble to jot down in my notebook a precise description of my point of entry, e.g., “a row of vegetable bins, woman in conical hat shelling peas,” I know that after a few minutes I will be hopelessly adrift somewhere amongst the cheap silk blouses, the miniature elephants, the torsos of freshly slaughtered pigs hanging from hooks, the rusty sewing machines, motor bikes,  tools, hand-embroidered rugs, cosmetics and perfumes that smell like eucalyptus or Secaucus, New Jersey before it was purged of pollutants.
In fact, unless I must be somewhere soon, that inevitable moment when I realize I am lost is greeted not with panic but a strange sort of relief.  For having reached the point of no discernible return to the outside world,  I know I am free–free from coercion by anyone else’s agenda, free from the need to keep my eyes looking straight ahead, free to observe the shapes, colors, and sounds of the world  around me more keenly than I could possibly do if I knew precisely where I was and why.
The feeling is trance-like, difficult to describe except, in no particular order, through images I have encountered:  in a Vietnamese market, I spot thin sheets of bright yellow paper with black outlines of skulls.  I buy several  sheets because I think I might be able to use them in some future collage though given the mildly inquisitive looks of a few bystanders, I realize the paper is linked with some mourning ritual I know nothing about.  But I have never before seen paper so saturated with yellow dye and probably will never see such again. The stark white imitation ivory pendant spotted years ago in a dusty bin when I was completely turned around in an alley of New Delhi jewelry vendors; even without bargaining, it cost about a dollar, and I still like to wear it. . . A perfectly hut-shaped sea urchin shell discovered when lost  in a thicket of ferns and fennel-grass on an island in Maine.  The peculiar way surf sometimes resembles the most intricate Belgian lace. . . The plaintive voice of a street balladeer in Galway, Ireland when I “forgot” the directions to a pub where I was supposed to meet someone. . .  A paint-peeled house off Route 175 near Jessup, Maryland–not far from where I work; a large sign in the window advertising aura readings and something called “Metaposcopy, ” which I later learned is the technique of reading a person’s fortune by analyzing the patterns of facial wrinkles. . . A stone in the rubble of a backyard, I forget where, but the stone seemed to be a naturally carved face of a woman,  with very large round eyes like those of the Mayan rain god, Tlaloc, and long strands of dark blue hair.
I am reminded of a story a friend once told me.  His grandfather made his living by carving wood into bowls, spoons, and buckets in a small Norwegian village.  Everyday the grandfather would walk through the nearby  forest to search for just the right kind of wood, but never with any particular pattern or shape in mind.  Someday he would come home with a basket filled with many pieces,  including old roots, sections of stumps, felled branches and trunks; on other days, the basket would be empty.  In fact, more often than not the basket would be empty, but that didn’t discourage the man one bit from setting out again the next day…perhaps the same forest, perhaps another.  Without necessarily knowing the word or concept, my friend’s grandfather was living in active pursuit of serendipity, that lovely word derived from a Persian fairy-tale about three men who lived in the land of Serendip (sometimes identified as Sri Lanka) and defined in my Random House College Dictionary as “an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident; in Webster’s as “accidental sagacity.”
In her essay “Winter Creek,” one section of her book Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water, 1995), Kathleen Dean Moore offers one of the best definitions of serendipity I have come upon, though she calls the process “poking around”:  “It is a matter of going into the land to pay close attention, to pry at things with the toe of a boot, to turn over rocks at the edge of a stream and lift boards to look for snakes or the nests of silky deer mice. . . .People who poke around have seeds in their socks and rocks in their pockets.”  Later Moore claims that “poking around is more capricious than studying, but more intense than strolling.  It’s less systematic than watching, but more closely focused.  Unlike hiking, it has no destination.”
It comes as no surprise that such seemingly aimless activities are often frowned upon, especially in the highly pragmatic and goal-oriented culture of contemporary industrial nations.  People prone to “poking around” may be labeled lazy or even childlike.  Such was not always the case: in medieval times, a saunterer was thought to be saintly as he wandered through villages seeking alms.  Yet at the same time even medieval dog handlers beat their dogs with sticks if they wandered off a scent trail, a practice Moore compares with the training of modern scientists, who must reduce their questions until they are “narrow and pointed” before they are encouraged to do research. (Moore, pp. 35-36).  A further example is the habit of many academics, particularly academic administrators, to admonish  a faculty member who diverges from a preordained syllabus, even if the divergence represents a more than justifiable adaptation to a particular class’s needs or the discovery in, say, the middle of a semester, of hitherto unknown material related to the aims of the course.
As noted earlier, I’m convinced my affinity for getting lost relates closely to my wish for serendipitous discoveries.   Ah, but most likely you protest at this point: how can any aptitude–”capability, capacity, talent”–bring about something which is accidental–”incidental, happening by chance”?   Even if aptitude is taken in the looser sense of readiness, a definition I  find appealing, how can all the readiness in the world influence matters that are governed by chance or randomness, outside the range of the conscious human will?  Unless, of course, one believes in the most primitive magic, such as a causative link between dancing and the forthcoming of needed rain, or in  such pop-psychology equivalents as claiming that the mere gesture of upturning the corners of the mouth into a smile will at once vanquish depression..  In somewhat different terms, how can one consciously pursue a process that, like dreams, relies so heavily on unconscious motives?
When I first began wandering through that  initial patch of woods at the beginning of this essay, I was at best consciously aware that I might find and eventually describe some unusual bird or flower, not that I would run smack into one of the most tangled obstacle courses of human thought:    the interrelated but distinctive mysteries of  luck, chance, fate,  randomness, and such cousins as patterns, predictions,  chaos, coherence.  Clearly,  serendipity is not synonymous with the unpredictable:  even the most experienced physicians cannot predict the precise day, let alone hour or moment, of death, yet no one would point to death as an example of “accidental sagacity.”  Likewise, nobody can reliably predict an earthquake or even tomorrow’s weather, yet neither a stormy nor cloudless sky –and certainly no collision of tectonic plates–meets the qualifications of an unsought, unexpected discovery.
Let me diverge for just a moment, if only in the spirit of wandering.  Often I have discovered that my non-purposive walks through streets, markets, or nature are far from easy; indeed, had I kept to a particular plan and goal, or at least taken the trouble to read a map, probably I would have in many cases ended up with far fewer cuts and bruises. For instance, not long ago, I was walking along the beachfront in Kennebunkport, Maine, walking on sand at low tide, stray memories of other experiences in that part of the country skimming through my mind as well as stray thoughts about a recently discovered bit of family history–the fact that one of my grandfathers stepped from steerage not at Ellis Island but at the docks of Portland where he worked for a while as a chandler.  My eyes fix alternately at the rock-coves and gulls of my memories and the enormous Victorian hotel in the distance–did my grandfather actually see such a place and, if so, did it remind him of a castle in the old country, a castle which because of his ethnic heritage he could never hope to enter?
Suddenly I began to slip, almost falling on some wet rocks covered with seaweed.  No more sand.  Indeed, as I looked towards the end of the peninsula, nothing but slippery rocks all the rest of the way.  Of course, I could have turned back, but then I would have forfeited the chance to discover some interesting sea-debris.  Wasn’t that bright green object ahead possibly something I had never seen before?  So on I went, slipping and stumbling for at least half a mile, at one point slightly twisting an ankle.  And the bright green object turned out to be nothing but the tatters of someone’s shirt.  Bad luck?  Perhaps. Had I fallen and broke my leg, certainly that would have been a more serious instance of bad luck.  A lapse of perception–i.e., a failure to realize that even though the overall pattern of a rock-strewn beach is more likely than, say, a Levittown subdivision, to  lead to a serendipitous find, there is absolutely no way of predicting whether the particular pattern or configuration will lead to anything of interest?  But as for the obstacles,  as any wanderer will attest, obstacles are–if not half the fun–certainly an essential part of the process, without which wandering would be reduced merely to touring.
Luck. Chance. Fate. Randomness. Patterns. Chaos. With each word, the problem  becomes more daunting. Because relative to the others, the word luck, usually synonymous with chance, figures most frequently  in modern parlance,  it is the easiest on which to focus.  Certainly anyone familiar with the Greek tragedies, especially Oedipus the King, knows that Fate is inextricably linked with supernatural powers beyond the will of man, and that to confuse luck or chance with Fate is the first sign of “modern” decadence from the traditional Greek point of view.  No accident that Jocasta, who likely knew exactly what she had done from the moment she cast away the infant Oedipus (albeit to save the life of her husband, Laius) to the occasion of her incestuous marriage with the grown Oedipus after he solves the riddle of the Sphinx,  refers to chance, a phenomenon both random and amoral, and not divine Fate when she tries to justify some of her behavior :
“What should a man fear?  It’s all chance/chance that rules our lives. Not a man on earth
can see a day ahead, groping through the dark./Better to live at random, best we can.”
Free from Jocasta’s obligation to pay at least lip service to Fate or the gods, with what insouciance we ourselves toss around the words luck and chance, which from this point on I will take the liberty of combining with the more familiar word luck:
Good night and good luck: Edward R. Murrow.  The luck of the Irish.  Lucky Strike. Luck be a lady tonight. .Lucky in love. Lucky Luciano. That  lucky old sun.. .  Any number of good luck charms: the rabbit’s feet of everyday life including such things as underwear and socks (I’ve been told a famous athlete always wears the same pair of underwear for each game); a cross or star on a chain; a particular coin; the extra candle on the birthday cake.  And all those don’ts to ward off bad luck: in China and Japan, never set your chopsticks upright in the rice bowl; almost everywhere in the world, either step or do not step on a crack.  Don’t walk under ladders, open umbrellas inside a house, throw spilled salt over your right rather than left shoulder, let a sneeze go unblessed, lest we compromise our luck.  How easily we toss around the word–to the point that we empty it of any meaning, much as when we utter such  American shibboleths “Have a Nice Day” to total strangers or its jazzier, more condensed version, “Have a Nice One. . .”
Likewise, the casually uttered “Take care” to signal the end of a conversation, whether we care about the particular person or not.  Luck is easy.  Luck is palatable as a cherry or strawberry candy called a Lucky Charm.  Though nobody–even the odds makers at Las Vegas or Belmont–has been able to devise a fool-proof formula for predicting luck,  the word is uppermost in the mind of whoever at this very moment is slipping a coin into a slot machine or buying a lottery ticket.  Or in the racing heart of a tourist trying to cross a street in say, Saigon or Delhi, a street filled with  motorbikes, carts, animals, automobiles, rickshaws, rushing pedestrians, a street whose traffic flows seemingly without cessation and certainly without  the superimposition of any outside order in the form of a  traffic light or policeman.  (Like winding rivers, such streets are far more suggestive of wandering than our generally well-regulated western streets, suggestive of purposive travel towards a pre-established goal.)
But is good luck necessarily linked with serendipity?  The character in Carl Dennis’s  provocative poem  “Aunt Celia, 1961”  would have us think so:
. . .But as for happiness,
There you need luck, the kind I had
In meeting your Uncle Harry after I’d given up
Thinking I’d find a man to suit me.
The blind luck of visiting a cousin in Pittsburgh. . .
Of sitting in the back of the hall near the exit,
Of forgetting my scarf and having to run back,
Of stumbling over a chair and falling. . . .
(Ranking the Wishes, Penguin Books, 1997, p. 35)
Later in the poem, Aunt Celia refers to the “luck most people have,/ Missing the
unknown rendezvous by inches,/ The scarf not left behind. . .”   Such people certainly may live reasonably good lives, but they will never experience the “noble” or extraordinary ones that result from a “happiness that cannot be earned, /The kind it makes no sense for you to look for. .”
That rare happiness one cannot consciously seek sounds very close to serendipity. Of course, given the confines of the poem, Aunt Celia does not comment on the possibility of  situations that might, just might, facilitate the likelihood of finding that special happiness; indeed, from her point of view the whole phenomenon is precisely that: a mysterious, almost magical phenomenon unconnected with traditional morality’s link between good works and subsequent rewards or popular psychology’s trite generalizations about  positive thinking’s power to bring about  (voila!)  all manner of wonderful things.
Examples of  good luck are easy enough to find though I suspect Aunt Celia would suggest  in  many such circumstances that either mysterious powers are at work–or simple common sense.   How lucky that so-and-so survived the car crash–  never mind that, as in the accident that took the life of Britain’s  Princess Diana, the one person who /luckily/  survived  was the bodyguard who alone among the passengers of that Mercedes had buckled his seat belt.  Your old piano still makes wonderfully melodic sounds?  How lucky. Never mind that is was made from the finest wood and wires,  that you have conscientiously kept it tuned.  (Of course,  buckled-up passengers do die in car crashes–what bad luck– and fine old pianos do sometimes have the misfortune of warping or cracking.  Therein lies both the rub and fascination).
Often good luck is defined as “being in the right place at the right time”–like Aunt Celia’s happenstance presence in Pittsburgh when she met Uncle Harry– though I doubt  anyone has ever felt much comfort upon hearing those  words, especially anyone who feels especially lacking in power to change, or at least modify, the unhappy course of his or her life– or, in somewhat different terms, to break his or her cycle of bad luck.   What, indeed, is bad luck?   But a knack for being in the wrong place at the right time?  The right time, that is, for the demons, whatever their names–for even if we do not believe in demons, even if there are no demons at all anywhere in the cosmos, they still must bear names. To wit:

You are born in a velvet-curtained four-poster bed.  Your mother sips wine from a crystal cup. From the grand piano in the next room Bach and Schubert extend white-gloved hands, greet your arrival.  The mansion on Parieszka Street in Prague blooms with jewel-colored light. But the year is 1935 and you are Jewish.
On an airplane, an ordinary flight from, say, Baltimore to Newark, you sit one row ahead or one row behind the one person who would most likely have made you happy had you had the chance to converse.  Perhaps a collaboration between the two of you would have produced a unicorn;  a solution to the riddle of the Peruvian Nazca Lines.    But there is no point in blaming the clerk who assigned your seat; she was only randomly selecting numbers from the available supply, like a deep-sea diver scooping the debris from the ocean floor to find clues about the crash of TWA Flight 800.
The Machana Yehudah market in downtown Jerusalem is lively with chickens, bins of bright oranges and persimmons, women with shopping bags woven from  twine.
A recent bride preparing for the first visit of her in-laws thinks she has purchased everything she needs when she suddenly remembers she forgot the parsley for the soup.  Just as she reaches for a bountiful stalk, the bomb–
You are driving to work along a long familiar route, listening to Coltrane’s version of “Blue Moon” and admiring the self-illuminating October trees.  High on dex and ephedra, the driver of a tractor-trailer loses control; his truck jack-knifes and crosses the median strip, a head-on collision so fiery the plumes of smoke are visible for hours.  If only you hadn’t delayed your departure by three seconds in order to check the contours of your eye shadow.
With the briefest lash of its tail, the winning sperm penetrates the egg–yes, that egg, the one  in whose yolk there lie in suspension the ancient genetic motes of what will become schizophrenia, Tay-Sachs disease.  Or the egg’s shell allows inside the one sperm out of billions that bears the seed-within-the-seed of Huntington’s Chorea.
Of course, in the spirit of that most open-ended game of all,  “What If?” each of the above vignettes can be revised by a slight shift:
The mansion could be moved to New York’s Park Avenue; the person behind or ahead of you could suddenly realize he has accidentally have been given the boarding pass of the bore sitting next to you; the bride could decide to skip the soup altogether; the sex that made you could have taken place at any number of different times.
The day is hot, there is a pervasive stench of chili pepper, shit, and open fires,  a rampant presence of tiny gnat-like creatures that are fond of entering mouths and nostrils, yet as soon as I see the tell-tale market gate, I cannot resist entering.  Not that I need anything.  I have, either in my backpack or in my hotel room, all the shampoo, cosmetics, clothing, paper, pencils, medicines, even junk jewelry that I can possibly have occasion for.  Not that I even want anything–except  once again to walk at my own pace and in my own haphazard way through yet another such market.  Somebody greets me in English; I smile and return the greeting.  A woman starts hawking her purple and green batik shirts, practically shoving them into my hands and it takes considerable effort to convince her I am not in the least bit interested.  I accidentally touch a shank of artificial hair at a table devoted to fancy ornaments; the proprietor assumes I want to purchase the hair and without even quoting a price begins to wrap it in a sheet of wrinkled green plastic.  Again I must call upon my abilities to say no in a country where I know maybe three or four words of its language.  I should know by now that simply stopping to look at an item can be a signal of a desire to purchase in such markets, but still I stop occasionally, perhaps to gage how far I have managed to get myself lost in the market’s maze, perhaps merely to take in the scene as a whole, my head somewhat dizzy, my feet beginning to hurt.  Yet I find myself stopping at the oddest places: the row of stalls where they sell rusty tools; a stall filled with scratching and shrieking live chickens.
Then suddenly I call off my search for whatever unknown object or experience I have
been pursuing, manage to find an exit.  Though relieved to be away from the crowds, I feel a  sense of disappointment.  How come I didn’t find anything remarkable at all?  Not so much anything of interest to buy but, more important, simply to contemplate?  Another “failure”, that is, another failure to achieve the “accidental sagacity” of serendipity though I can perceive no reasons for my “failure.”  Haven’t I behaved exactly the same as on other occasions when I found myself suddenly confronting some utterly unanticipated craft object of intricate beauty or a particularly compelling human face?
I must  someday find a name for such a non-discovery, such a failure of serendipity, even though I  am fully aware that serendipity has a fragile, if any, connection with  a conscious willingness to discover the generally elusive and infrequent fruits of “accidental sagacity”  (though, of course, without the willingness to enter into such a search and what Pasteur called “readiness,” the entire possibility is moot.)   And does the serendipitous find or event necessarily have to be something good? (See later).    The longer I think about serendipity the more I realize its implications go much beyond a facile willingness to travel without a map.   Consider, for example, the different levels of serendipity, a concept I came across on a web site by Peter Cochrane entitled “Serendipity-Do We Have a Choice?” (connected@telegraph.co.uk–15.1.97).    Cochrane begins by contrasting the medieval librarian, who was “the guardian and regulator of information, the contents list, index, filing system, and retrieval mechanism.  He alone decided who saw what, when and where. . .” with the “seemingly infinite world of the Internet.”   At the other end of the spectrum,  we find the CD Rom, contemporary equivalent of the medieval librarian, offering “almost zero serendipity.”   To maximize the creative possibilities of serendipity, Cochrane posits an ideal world somewhere between the Net and the CD Rom; a world, or system, he believes we can  achieve, paradoxical as that might sound, by design– at least technologically.
Of course, the more open a system, the greater likelihood that our serendipitous discoveries might not only lack usefulness, aesthetic or otherwise, but actually be distracting.  Anyone who has surfed the internet looking for particular information knows this problem well.  Indeed, when I myself did a search for items relevant to serendipity, I came across not only numerous names of resorts, restaurants, music groups, and clubs that presumably appreciate the appeal of a word suggestive of the possibility that like Christopher Columbus in search of the Indies one can discover some hitherto unsuspected pleasure, or even a whole new world,  by buying a time-share in Serendipity Gardens, but also several ads for something called a “Bottle Sock,” which can be ordered in red, forest green, and earth tones from a company in Boulder, Colorado. There were a number of references to wine cellars and even particular varieties of wines, such as marechal–and my favorite find: a detailed recipe for broccoli-cheese soup. I have not tried it out.  Can a particular collusion of broccoli and cheese reveal some hitherto unsuspected comestible: perhaps an edible green pearl?
When surfing the net, it is simple, of course, to skip those citations that appear irrelevant, or if one is frightfully conscientious, to delete them after a brief look.  Likewise, when walking through the woods, I have often gathered a variety of leaves, fallen nuts, pieces of bark, stones,   the woven twigs of fallen nests,  feathers, clusters of strange red berries that look perilous but might just make an interesting garland. . .And as soon as I emerge, I realize I must do the equivalent of deleting, that is, throwing away most of my finds.  A few I save, sometimes incorporating them into collages, sometimes just for the sake of it–until the odd-shaped conglomeration of, say, feathers and mud emits a noxious odor that grows worse each day, an odor of decay or perhaps simply an odor whose underlying implication is that  once removed from their natural environment such objects simply have no claim to being displayed on a shelf in someone’s living room.
Aside from the great voyages of discovery,  science offers the richest source of serendipitous finds– though some of these might more closely fit into a sub-category that Royston  M. Roberts calls “pseudo serendipity”:  accidentally finding how  to reach a goal consciously sought  in contrast with the prepared  (but not programmed) mind actually reaching a goal unsought .  (Serendipity: Accidental Discoveries in Science, New York: John Wiley, 1989).  As we shall see, whether they are technically closer to Roberts’s sub-category or not,  many serendipitous scientific discoveries are unquestionably of human benefit though others, perhaps less recognized, have been found ultimately to be of dubious worth, even harm.                  First the good finds.  Probably the most famous example of scientific serendipity is Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin when a stray bit of mold fell into a petri dish that someone had left uncovered.   Recalling an earlier semi-accidental experiment when one of his own tears fell into a culture of nasal secretions collected when Fleming had a nasty cold,  an experiment which led to the discovery of an antibiotic enzyme he called lysozome,  instead of tossing out the contaminated petri dish, he eventually isolated and identified the mold as a member of the genus Penicillium.    Actually, curiosity about the power of bread mold to fight disease goes back to ancient Egypt and Rome.   Of course, these anonymous researchers lacked awareness of the germ theory of disease, but their failure to discover anything useful was also due in part to the fact that only a few of the enormous number of such molds are medicinally  effective.  Hence the luck factor:  the particular bread mold that fell into Fleming’s petri dish just happened to be one of those very few.
Noting all the other instances of scientific serendipity would take many pages.  Thus I select but a few others,  my criterion being that  the person engaged in the research was actually looking for something else entirely.  For example, heparin, an acid in liver tissue whose commercial form is used to treat thrombosis by preventing blood coagulation, was discovered when a medical student was actually trying to analyze the nature of pro rather than anticoagulation.
The blood-thinning drug warfarin results indirectly from the quest for a reliable means of killing rats.  And if Eli Metchnikoff had gone, as originally planned, to the circus instead of playing around with starfish larvae he might never have observed phagocytosis, the process by which a cell engulfs a foreign particle.  (I owe these points to coming upon a web site called Scripps: New in Science, www.foundations.org./newscience/essay html. one dreary afternoon when out of frustration of waiting for a student to show up for a conference on his botched term paper in Introduction to Literature and Composition 111, I clicked on my office computer to check on the stock market , only to be informed that for mysterious unstated reasons said information was not available at the moment.  Even more frustrated–there was still no sign of the student and I greatly wished to head home–I decide to glance instead at the day’s news events, when lo and behold, there flashed on my screen word of cutbacks in grants for scientific research. . . click, press. . . for projects whose goals are not clearly delineated in advance and a brief discussion of the foolishness of such a policy.)
Royston M. Roberts accounts for numerous other serendipitous moments, including one version of the discovery of quinine for the treatment of malaria.  Stumbling through the Andean jungle while suffering from a high fever, a seventeenth-century Indian from Colombia or Bolivia fell to the ground at the edge of a pool and drank deeply of its stagnant but cool water, which happened to be contaminated by bits of bark from a nearby quina-quina  (chincona) tree.  Instead of dying from the bitter tasting “poison,” the man lived to tell the story of his miracle cure back in his village. Word of the bark’s curative power allegedly reached nearby Jesuit missionaries though the anti-malarial substance in the bark of the chincona tree was not isolated until 1820 and its synthesis in a laboratory not achieved until 1944.  But surely coming upon the legendary pool was a stroke of sheer luck and the curative drinking therefrom hardly an instance of applied sagacity?  Perhaps. However,  given the enormous prevalence of malaria,  it requires only a minimal stretch of the imagination to envision many such jungle wanderers, all suffering feverishly from the disease, coming upon many such pools in which there floated many such bits of chincona bark.  How can one claim with any certitude that at least a few such wanderers, never mind their lack of formal education, could not have made the connection between the pool’s bitter water and the subsequent abatement of fever?   Nor is the legend an example of pseudo serendipity, for  it is most unlikely the feverish jungle wanderer consciously sought a cure for his disease rather than merely a slaking of his terrible thirst.
Archeology is another area rife with serendipitous discoveries.  Indeed, Mary Leakey went so far as to claim that  “in archeology you almost never find what you set out to find.”  The statement can in a sense be reversed:  the initial discoverers of several major archeological sites   actually set out to find a well, a mineral deposit, perhaps even buried electrical cable. The unexpected jug, statue, corpse, or jawbone full of oddly jagged teeth might at first be perceived as nothing more than an obstacle, a nuisance interfering with the intended practical purpose of the digging or excavation.  Luckily, the peasant who hit upon fragments of sculpture while digging for a well near Herculaneum in 1709 was thoughtful enough to spread the word to a local prince, thus initiating the long and often haphazard process of salvaging the ruins of both Herculaneum and Pompeii.  Likewise, in 1924 a worker excavating for lime in a cave named Taung near Johannesburg noticed what seemed to be the cast of a child-size brain.  He brought it to the director of the mining project who turned it over to a Professor Raymond Dart who in turn identified the cast as a nearly complete skull.  What came to be called the Taung Child’s skull was eventually found to be the oldest specimen  known at that time of a human being who walked upright.over two million years ago.  In 1950 peat-cutters in Denmark first found the famous Tolland Man, his leather cap, belt, neck rope and all, while another peat-cutter, this time in Manchester, England, first sighted the foot of the Lindow Man, the chemical analysis of whose stomach revealed a partly digested scorched cake, later hypothesized to be a key item of a Druid sacrificial ritual.  Then there are the Chinese peasants who accidentally unearthed the first of the thousands of terracotta warriors that protected the tomb of the ancient Emperor Qin; the French road workers who noticed a human bone protruding from a rabbit hole back in 1852, leading to the discovery of the Stone Age Aurignac people; the sociologist Stephen Young who happened to trip on a root in Thailand, landing on the lip of an ancient unglazed pot which led to the discovery of other such pots and ultimately to a a major revision of theories about the development of metallurgy. . .
Often I wonder about the peasants and peat-cutters who never bothered to report their unexpected finds, who in their impatience to complete the task of the moment might actually have tossed away the arm of an ancient sculpture or even a dead human hand preserved for centuries by tannic acid.  How many terracotta armies or buried cities whose architectural ingenuity surpasses the imaginative capacities of the present human mind are now lying in wait for a well-digger who may or may not ever materialize.  The very thought of so much potential serendipity or serendipity-in-situ strains my own imagination, much as what happens when I sometimes think of all the billions of never-to-be-born and their never-to-be realized potential.
I recall the endless back wrenching hours spent breaking, tapping, scooping, and even banging earth and stone, only to come up with nothing at all. . .at best a few scattered goat or sheep bones,  the ring from a recently discarded Coca-Cola can, the remains of a barbecued chicken consumed perhaps a week or two before. Even the particular dig I was involved with,   which took place in Mallorca in 1991, had, however, its share of serendipity.  Our main task was to find shards of a black shiny pottery called Bell Beaker ware, a type of presumably ceremonial pottery that has mysteriously turned up in places widely separated as Hungary and Ireland.  Though the other volunteers and I found only a handful of possible Bell Beaker shards, one of us did scrape his trowel on the lid of what turned out to be an enormous stone “griddle” dating back to the Copper Age.
What, however, if the serendipitous discovery of, say, a cask containing a richly colored brew turns out to contain a poisonous substance so potent –perhaps a new virus— that all the investigators become seriously ill and perhaps even die just from subjecting the contents of the cask to chemical analysis?
In other words, are all serendipitous finds good?  Or if they seem to be initially good, or at least benevolent, is it possible they can eventually lead to the development of something threatening to natural survival and hence to human beneficence as well?  Unfortunately, the answer to the latter question is yes–that is, yes, serendipitously discovered and initially desirable substances as well as techniques have culminated in what Edward Tenner, in his provocative book Why Things Bite Back  (New York: Knopf, 1996), calls “the revenge of unintended consequences.”
Take the revolt of bacteria against antibiotics, including penicillin–a problem anticipated by Alexander Fleming  as far back as 1945, when he claimed that the drug itself could breed resistant strains of bacteria which in turn could effect other people.  Some bacteria were found not only to resist but actually destroy penicillin.  The same scenario applies to other antibiotics such as tetracyclines, which can encourage the growth of rapidly multiplying “bacterial plasmids,” capable of producing resistant genes even in previously harmless bacteria, which transmit the resistance to pathogenic bacteria. (Tenner, 55-56).
Other “revenge effects” involve the negative serendipitous effects of reducing water pollution and land erosion –i.e., the shipworm and kudzu phenomena respectively.   As for the first,  introduction of methods to reduce pollution in New York harbor led to a most unexpected–and certainly unsought– effect : the revival a number of destructive mollusks that had presumably been killed off by tar and oil back in the 19th century.  Shipworms in particular, which are spiny-shelled mollusks equipped with siphons, began to bore into wooden piers in the l980s, helped afterwards by gribbles that chewed the hollowed pilings, thus rapidly reducing the diameter of the pillars from nearly a foot to a mere few inches. The problem has already cost hundreds of millions of dollars–though, serendipitously enough, it has brought about a new market for recycled milk cartons which serve as “borer-proof” piers.
And what gardener in the southeastern United States has not been frustrated by thick tendrils of the rapidly growing kudzu vine that can choke off anything in its path?  Indeed, according to Tenner, kudzu has been known to down telephone poles and knock out power transformers, thus causing widespread blackouts, render train tracks impassable. . .It can overwhelm and envelop nearly any stationary object–unmoved automobiles. . .abandoned houses, even (so says Southern folklore) unconscious drunks.” (Tenner, p. 187).  Yet the vine was  introduced by the U.S. Soil Conservation Service to counter the devastating effects of insects and erosion on Southern cotton fields.  In a further irony, attempts to destroy kudzu with various herbicides have resulted in the destruction of vegetation and the concomitant exposure of the soil, which in turn brings about the very erosion kudzu was supposed to control.
Being drawn to situations conducive to serendipity creates other, less dramatic, but nonetheless real difficulties. Only semi-facetiously does Kathleen Dean Moore note that “poking around” is “an art that takes a certain stubborn resolve. . . You have to be alert or you will find yourself sucked away by a work ethic strong as a vacuum: You will stop to pull a single blackberry vine, which will make you look for another and another, until you are dogging from one vine to the next and then heading back to the shed for a shovel. You have to have a strong character or guilt will overcome you  when you realize you forgot to thaw dinner. . .” (Moore, 35).  To Moore’s insights on the difficulty of seeking out situations most likely to result in serendipitous finds, I  add the anxiety engendered by the lack of a preordained goal.
From our earliest days, we are confronted by such preordained goals: as children we must learn to distinguish between our own property and that of others, learn to eat with utensils, learn to control our bladders and bowels, learn not to touch hot stoves and not to run across streets, and–for reasons Little Red Riding Hood’s mother would never have imagined–not to talk to strangers,  let alone be enticed to accept an invitation to go off with them to some seemingly exciting place or perform some act seemingly filled with joyous promise.  Then we enter school.  In kindergarten we must learn to play games cooperatively and to brush paint on paper, not on the floor or walls; in first grade, we must learn to read and write, add and subtract; moving through the system, we must at particular times learn to do increasingly complicated tasks such as solving algebraic problems or learning how to use subordinate clauses, etc. Then college and/or some sort of vocational or professional training, and at least traditionally, a lockstep advance to marriage and children as well as a job, itself subdivided into steps and goals often linked with making as much money as possible.  Of course, in every generation there are those who defy the pre-set goals, dropping out, drifting, perhaps becoming criminals or creative artists.  Even most travel conforms to pre-established goals–and I refer not just to the packaged tour but the self-created itinerary, which may well involve making hotel reservations many months in advance of an independent journey.  Even nomads, according to Eric Leed’s  book, The Mind of the Traveler : From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism  (Basic Books, 1991), have a goal in mind as they wander through the desert: to find a better source of food or land more hospitable for protection from the elements.
Of course, I could say here that encouraging oneself to get lost or to risk finding nothing of interest constitute goals in themselves.  But that would be too facile a statement.  Perhaps, however, the issue is not the absence of a preordained goal but the embracing of  goals whose nature differs from those traditionally established.  For even when I let myself wander in an Asian bazaar, do I not have the (unstated) goal of finding something so astoundingly new and different that it will create new patterns of thought?  For instance, that red and gold framed Chinese mirror I purchase for a few yuan and soon learn is meant to be hung on the outside of a house to frighten away the demons: a whole new cluster of insights about the dangerous behavior of Narcissus and the  “ism” of self-absorption that has been named for him.
That abandoned wooden swing, its ropes rotting and dangling from between the trees to which the swing was originally attached: could that swing not be the start of a story about the imagined child who long ago loved to hoist him or herself back and forth on its seat, perhaps braiding and unbraiding the ropes in order to twirl in different directions?  Perhaps the imagined child is a version of the remembered child and the accidental discovery of the swing while walking through woods revives a memory of a long dead grandparent who created the swing especially for you, sawing the wood by hand.  Or, appealing to another type of imagination, the swing is still in use by an abandoned wild child who might at any moment leap out from the underbrush?
Which brings me to the close relationship between serendipity and artistic creativity. Since I am most familiar with the literary and visual arts, I will  comment on those though I expect choreographers, architects, and composers of music would express similar ideas.  The longer I write, the more I find that outlines or elaborate plot summaries prior to writing, say, a novel,  have only one use: to be broken.   Indeed, as has often been noted, the created characters themselves will break the outline once they come to life.  If outlines, summaries, and conceptualized sketches for a painting are rigidly followed, the result is stiffly predictable art,  greeting card verse or  what emerges from paint-by-numbers kits.  Anyone who cannot adapt to and even welcome the possibility of accidental effects is not a true artist, no matter how technically skilled.
Take printmaking as an example, particularly etching, one of the more demanding and unforgiving types of visual art.  No matter how skillful the preliminary design is incised into the plate, one never knows how the acid will react on any particular day, likewise the ground and the inks.  Even the hand motions that go into wiping the inked plate are never exactly the same from one version of the same plate to another, so no two plates in an edition can be precisely the same.      I think of a friend who for many years has studied printmaking with me in an ongoing workshop. A talented artist,  Sandra is often disappointed if an unanticipated speck or line shows up when she prints her plate–yet her best work contains precisely those unanticipated elements, and I think deep down she knows that.  Otherwise why would she choose as her subject matter  flowers, fruits, and vegetables, often with complicated stalks and tendrils, juxtaposed against glass jars whose reflected light changes constantly as she creates her images on the plate?  If she really wanted predictable “perfection,” she would choose to etch Mondrian-like boxes and circles drawn with a compass.  So I take the liberty of calling Sandra a closet serendipidist, whose goal of representational perfection really masks a desire for surprise.
Likewise, my aimless walks through markets and woods may not be so aimless after all. Leaving oneself open to serendipity does, after all, have a goal: not a preordained goal, but the goal of surprise, an experience or find that will shatter the grids of repetitiveness and the ordinary.
______________

SHAPING  THE  FIRE
At the supermarket, between the matzo ball mixes and dixie cup dispensers, I find a squat glass half filled with wax, a wick the sole hint it’s meant to be a candle.  I do not buy it to slip under a chafing dish; I do not buy it to scent a room.   Next Sunday will be my mother’s yahrzeit,  one year to the day of her death. Though I know little about such rituals, I am determined to light the candle, read the Kaddish–that prayer for the dead that celebrates the power of one of the world’s best known creator-gods, he who hid behind a pillar of fire–and perhaps create a flare so intense even her dead blue eyes  could see it.  Not that I believe for a second they can see anything at all that any of us can even imagine seeing.
On the sidewalk outside a coffeehouse on Madison Avenue and E. 93rd Street, a woman dressed  in black spandex pants and shirt, black boots despite the heat– lights a cigarette, sighs with pleasure as she inhales the smoke. The flame from her lighter, which is also black, is shaped like a long tongue by the light spring breeze. The brief spurt of color makes me briefly happy.
It is 1968. An American soldier holds his lighter up to the twigs and thatch that roove a spindly village hut, not far from Danang.  His eyes, his skin, turn bright red, as if with fever. Years later he dreams still of hut-shaped fires, rounded, rooved by twig-like flames,  with small gaps serving as doors through which one could, if one wished to, enter the fire.  In Quang Ngai Province,  village of My Lai,  hundreds of Calley’s boys torch every hut, every tree, every bush, nearly every person in sight.  In February, 1991, enormous flames from the oil wells of Kuwait joined together, rose so high they might have charred the very stars above the desert had they not slowly receded,  slowly  assume the shape of small red flowers, much to the disappointment of the Iraqi incendiaries.  Could this fascination with shapeless, uncontrolled fire be some perverse version of the Zoroastrian fire worship?  But always the Zoroastrians contained their sacred fires in specially constructed fire temples,  versions of which can still be found in parts of the middle east and Asia,  particularly Iran, and in the city of Bombay.
Slash and burn, slash and burn; so peasants for centuries cleared land for their
crops, a process known in northern Europe as swidden agriculture. But in the desert of 1991, no one wished to plant, only to exult in the symbolic destruction of the victorious enemy.  Not one burning bush could grow in that desert, not one.
From the Book of Isaiah: “And the people shall be as the burning of lime: as thorns cut up shall they be burned in the fire. . .And the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof  shall become burning pitch.  It shall not be quenched night nor day; the smoke thereof shall go up forever: from generation to generation it shall lie waste; none shall pass through it for ever and ever.”
The young woman dressed in black who has lit a cigarette on the sidewalk outside a stylish coffeehouse on Madison Avenue and E. 93rd Street lights another and then another. She cannot say with absolute conviction what she enjoys more: the taste of smoke or the long tongue-shaped flame spurting from her lighter.  Even though she is sitting outside, people around her glare, waves their hands to divert the smoke from her cigarette. Americans are uneasy with private fires, no matter how shaped, unless they are using the fire:  to char a slab of meat on a Sunday afternoon patio; to add crackling sounds and a  small glow to a room that is probably already overheated.
When Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked a lantern,and burnt Chicago down. . .
“Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest burning” (T.S. Eliot, The Fire Sermon)
Better to marry than burn baby burn especially
since some think the world will end in fire, the Holocaust a misnomer for shoah  –an overwhelming fire– burn baby burn  South Central , Watts, the 14th Street Corridor of the Nation’s Capital, ca. 1968–and for dessert we’ll have burnt Alaska on a platter kindled by a match where would we be without matches big fat red-tipped safety matches, may I have a light, may I? have you ever smelled kerosene? No worse than the smell of your neighbor’s  barbecue pit adulterating the gentle fragrance of a summer afternoon burn baby burn fat sizzling from thick red steaks, escaping from the pit of artificial coals to create tiny spasms of fire on thousands of decks and patios all over American burning burning burning
At sundown on Friday night, a woman with a white cloth wrapped around her eyes bends and lights the sabbath candles.  They rest in elaborate silver candlesticks inherited from her great-great grandmother, who escaped from Poland well before the time she would have had scarcely a chance to escape its fiery ovens.  A child blows out the candles on his birthday cake. Though he is sung to and urged to make a wish and even has been gifted with an extra candle for good luck, still he has extinguished how ever many candles are lit to represent each of his years on earth that have already passed, always and forever, immer und ewig.  The child laughs. The woman removes the white cloth from her eyes,  goes on to bless the bread and wine.  Why is there no blessing for the candles themselves? BLESS THE CANDLES THAT CONTAIN THE FIRE, BLESS THE CANDLES THAT WHEN THEY MELT AWAY SYMBOLIZE A BLOODLESS SACRIFICE, BLESS THE CANDLES WITH A SPECIAL CANDLE, which, of course, will soon die down, like the flame in the squat glass I will light to mark the year since my mother’s death.  As if the Roman calendar had anything to do with her yahrzeit.  As if I really knew about such things.
In the dream I saw a perfectly round red bowl.  But it was shaped not from clay but from fire itself, small flames joined to small flames in circular layers with even a lip on the top layer of the bowl’s circumference.  Of course, I dare not touch the bowl; it rests on the earth which is itself not burning.  I think of the Burning Bush and the Pillar of Fire, both of which were self-contained, but mostly I think  how women were the primary shapers of fire:  women who create pots, by hand or at a wheel, then use some form of enclosed fire to harden them; women who tend the hearth, all the many daughters of Hestia;  women who receive a man’s fire, join it with her own fire to make a child inside the secret enclosure of her body.  In New Guinea, according to James Frazer, it was thought that women, particularly old women, drew fire from their own bodies in order to cook the tarot roots and yams.  Men, especially young boys, frequently succeeding in stealing a woman’s fire.
But as much as I would delight in the absolute truth of these suppositions,  I cannot ignore that in many cultures fire is male; “the fire, like the father, is the master of the house” ( ancient India).  The head of the village, always male, shaped fire to keep wild beasts away from the tents; to guard herdsmen and flocks. Fire is the not only the guardian but the pastor, the priest, the male ancestor. It is the repository of food for the dead, the medium of sacrifice. And, of course, the sine qua non of the hearth.  Women may have cooked over the hearth, but only men could offer it ritual sacrifices: milk, ghee, fermented liquors, even corn and meat. Agnihotra: a sacrifice of fire in three forms, carried throughout the day by the masters of the house.  And so it is he who shapes the domestic fire, he who through his sacrifices to the sacred fire grants universal order to the household, even possesses god-like powers to control the movement of the sun, to purify the soul, to bless a marriage or birth, and to harmonize the living and the dead.
Classical scholar George Nagy mentions an interesting side note regarding  fire purification: Zoroastrians, unlike Indians, are unequivocally opposed to cremation.  Instead the dead are left in a particular place, soon to be consumed by vultures.  A major reason is that fire itself can be contaminated or rendered impure if it has come into contact with a corpse.  In other words, that which purifies something else must be pure in itself . Laments about  earth, water, and air pollution are all too familiar;  to think that even now  in parts of Persia and in the city of Bombay,  people are concerned not with pollution from fire, but with the possibility that fire itself can be contaminated by human flesh.
According to Johan Goudsblom, a contemporary historian of fire,  control over fire constitutes a major distinction between man and best.  The more advanced a society’s control over fire, the more skilled its capacities to shape fire, the more advanced that society. (Fire and Civilization, Penguin, 1992).
One of the most grotesque domestic disasters in recent history : a fire so violent it  resulted in the nearly immediate shapelessness of its object happened at the Cocoanut Grove Night Club in Boston, November 1942.  Over 400 people, who but moments before despite the distant War made merry  with drinking  and singing and laughing, died in the stairwells, died on the dance floor, died gasping for air, trampled  just short of a window.  ( The night club owners were ultimately charged with gross negligence.)   Lottie Christy of Park Drive, Boston,  and Claudia Boyle of no known address, two of the eight chorus girls, made a spectacular escape, jumping into the arms of a male dancer.
Did Lottie and Claudia fear fire the rest of their lives?  Did they shun matches, stoves, heaters; cower when they smelled in the fall the pungency of burning leaves?  Please drop me a note if either of you is still alive.
Of course, some argue that a flame is shapeless by definition, just as one might argue the same about water.  A child drawing a fire with red crayon always creates wavery triangles with perhaps a little spiral at the tip of each.  But even a photographer with the most advanced camera cannot catch the shape of fire, only an illusion thereof.  Moving, always moving, like an upside-down waterfall.  Does the rapid movement of fire make it easier for barefoot fire-dancers to perform their act?  Always in Bali they would perform with serenity and grace.  Some claim to eat fire, as if they were eating cotton candy.  Abracadabra alakazam: even after watching a fire-eater on Les Champs-Elysees, I believe this to be a magic trick, accomplished, perhaps, by some citron flavored cold fire.
Who, men or women, have been more misshapen by fire, disfigured, even put to death?  I think of  sati, a custom in which the Indian widow was forced to be burned by the fire of her husband’s cremation– a practice now outlawed but still occasionally practiced–;the Salem witch; the bride whose sari catches fire from deliberately spilled kerosene because of her meager dowry; the central European witch; the woman who set herself on fire in a field behind my grandmother’s country house–everyone whispered that she was crazy, mishuganah, nuts. I was not allowed to see her burnt remains, though I heard that her skin had turned to black flakes.  But men, too, have been destroyed by shapeless fire, have immolated themselves–remember the young man from Baltimore protesting the Vietnam War; remember the Buddhist monks of Hue?
And the victims of the auto-da-fe, no more segregated by gender than the victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
I don’t  wanna set the world on fire/ I just wanna start a flame in your heart . . .
What if I must leave the house after I light the yahrzeit candle for my mother?  To blow out the candle would mean bad luck, very bad luck. But what if a stray  breeze billows the kitchen curtain, which brushes against the tip of the lit candle. . .No matter, the candle’s flame must extinguish itself naturally, like the fire in an earthenware pot at the Hindu pujah ceremony, the latter a fire of purification.  How purify grief?  I undertake the ancient yahrzeit ritual because I do not know what else to do and she, herself, one year ago was reduced by fire to mere ashes–as if, as if–
In the former Yugoslavia one summer, long before the troubles became open warfare,  I watched with a former friend a lamb being roasted over a fiercely red fire.  How many of its ancestors had been thus roasted and offered to the gods or whomever claimed godliness?  The fire continued to leap, dance, and roar well into the chilly evening, its shape consisting of its many rapidly changing shapes. Fire, not water as some mistakenly believe, is what Heraclitus assumed to be the first principle of the flux he believed to be characteristic of the natural world.    Ice embalms; it makes possible a steady state, preserves the status quo.  Fire–pace Robert Frost–like time itself constantly  moves and transforms.
The day has arrived.  I delay lighting the little yahrzeit candle until after I have read the morning paper.  At first, I fear the flame will go out within minutes, so short is the wick on the thick wax candle inside that glass.  But after some twisting and bending, the wick stays lit, I have nothing to fear.  Instead of reading the Kaddish, the ancient prayer for the dead, I simply speak to her as embodied in the flame, now burning steadily.  Good memories only, of course.  Late in the afternoon I see the reflection of her flame against the glass as if there were two flames, one my mother, the other the memory of her, somewhat less vibrant, a kind of more autumnal orange, than the flame itself. For a moment I think I see the two flames joining, but that is, of course, an illusion of glass and light.
Slowly the candle recedes. I want it to stop retreating, carrying my motherflame with it. I want it to remain exactly as it is, for  when the candle burns down completely I will know that once again I have lost my mother.  And I must wait a full year to briefly– through the flesh of another candle– once more bring her back:  not in the form of white and black ashes clinging to the keel of a boat under the sea where she was scattered;  not in the form of a painfully thin woman twisted nearly into the earth like a very old apple tree;  least of all not in the form of a young woman with long hair, posing hand on hip in front of a waterfall somewhere in New Jersey, but only in the form of a memory and its reflection on a squat glass.
Until then and long after I must continue to sing all of our old songs.

___________________

AMBER, WATER, AND THE DAUER FORMATION
In the snapshot of my then year-old grandson I received in the mail one day, I have just thrust forward the swing in which he sits;  a week later now and more than 200 miles south of that Central Park swing I can hear his sheer delight, his small hands clutching the swing’s chains just before it begins to move back to its original position, only to be thrust forward again by his  grandmother.  But in the snapshot itself the swing will always and forever remain in its forward, most exciting position,  always on the brink of its backward trajectory.
The stopped clock;  the stilled swing;  milk pouring from a  pitcher held by a Vermeer milkmaid, the pitcher never to empty : our perception of all  such images marks  our ultimately doomed efforts to halt the passage of time, even if to do so we must consciously invoke illusion.  So appealing is the possibility of stopping, let alone reversing time, many  of  us are drawn to fantasies thereof,   even if we must  imagine entering  a state of being like that of a woodchuck in hibernation,  most of our bodily processes  dormant, our mind itself in a dreamless dream- state.  Or we might take our cue from a Balinese trance dancer,  nerve endings so numbed even flames will not sear them or make us cry out in pain; in moments of extreme need, we might even resort to  identifying with an insect caught centuries ago in the resin of a Baltic tree, our body now encased in amber.
Exploring the imaginative connections between hibernation, trance, and amber formation and their relation to our perceptions of time  demands a cutting back and forth across wide expanses of both time and space,  such an activity in itself a tantalizing fantasy, as well as  braiding together  such disciplines as biology, psychology, religion, music,  poetry, and geology.  At the moment, this  free-form essay itself cannot be more than a playful example of suspended animation.  Anything more would require a vast study, ideally an incursion into the minds of all those who have preceded me and will succeed me.  And let’s not fool ourselves for a moment.  When you finish reading what I have written you will, of course, be that much older than when you began and even if you became sufficiently absorbed as to neglect  for that brief duration certain  pressing obligations, when you finish reading you will resume your customary animations: the dog must be fed, the phone messages must be acknowledged, the treadmill must be trod upon, and, of course, you have miles before you can sleep, miles. . .More important, you will resume your brooding about the swiftness of life, the inflexible nature of time, the mystery of life’s creation in general and your own creation in particular, the inevitability of pain, the constantly moving target of love.

More than any other modern poet, Robert Frost expresses a yearning for a trance-like, dreamless state of being that closely resembles hibernation–though the season need not be winter nor need there be an explicitly rendered despair preceding the wish to experience at least a temporary transcendence of everyday life: “I’d like to get away from earth awhile/  And then come back to it and begin over” (“Birches”).  Of course, as he later implies in the same poem,  his wish should not be confused with the death wish; rather, he imagines riding a swinging branch “toward heaven,” the branch dipping down soon afterwards to deposit him once more upon the solid, familiar earth.
What in the name of transcendence does Frost seek?  Presumably not the near-total oblivion of hibernation or a closely analogous state called the Dauer Formation (Dauer in German means permanence):  a larval stage when worms, especially the intriguingly named ice-worms, migrate in search of a better environment. During this time, which does not necessarily coincide with the winter months when food in northern climates is scarce, the worm neither eats nor breeds.  Imagine wandering through forests or deserts with no concerns about the number of calories from fat consumed in the course of a day, no worries about teen-age pregnancy , indeed, no concerns about anything at all except finding the right tree which will become both the locale and raw material for your new home.  Perhaps the vaunted birch tree itself?   If such an experience were available to humans, would it not briefly be appealing as an alternative to driving around in the company of a real estate agent, Sunday classifieds in hand?   At least briefly.
But surely, despite his variations on the lure of a quasi-hibernatory state, such a keen observer of the natural world as Robert  Frost does not wish to obliterate his senses.  Rather, he wishes to remain on the branch at the moment it reaches its apex, remain at that point forever, experiencing to the fullest that moment’s odd meld of excitement and relief.   For it is time he wishes to freeze, not his ability to sense: a  solid, immobile block of time in order to watch the snow falling in a neighbor’s woods and be free from time’s inevitable flux with its flotsam of responsibilities and banal promises, and worst of all, particularly for youth-obsessed western culture, its jetsam of graying hair, sagging skin, tiny aches where none existed before–all the markers, subtle and not so subtle, of our inevitable aging.
The tendency of some to write off such yearnings as pathological desires to regress to infantile helplessness ( e.g. Freud’s concept of the “oceanic experience”) merely parches the sap not only from Frost’s images but the many analogues of his vision.. Consider, for example, the Buddhist concept of samsara , in which one experiences the genuine self only by casting off the demands of the  false, temporal self, especially the latter’s constant grasping and gasping  in its perpetual  demands that we act,  that we rush out to the shopping mall or “surf the net” rather than listen to the music of the rain.  Consider as well the entry of the self into the inner power of the Ayin, or nothingness, as delineated in the teachings of Jewish mysticism known as the Kabbalah, which bear some uncanny resemblances with Buddhist teachings.  Think of the  wish to believe in paradox, to hold simultaneously two opposing needs, such as the need to be separate and the need at the same time to be joined to another human being. Or even if, like myself, you have a scanty background in modern physics, think of the paradox of quantum theory, “in which subatomic stuff can act like both waves and particles and be in more than one place at a time” (George Johnson, “On Skinning Schrodinger’s Cat,” New York Times, June 2, 1996).
But how few of us are privileged by temperament and opportunity to enter genuinely into the Buddhist or Kabbalistic experience–I dismiss at this point the all too numerous pronunciamentos of self-anointed gurus touting the possibility  (for a “modest fee,” naturally) of instant mind control, instant nirvana, instant bliss, alluring as they may seem at superficial glance– or to work at the cutting edge of modern research into the physics of paradox. When confronted with such challenges, I feel a mixture of awe, envy, and futility.  How can I, a middle-aged American woman with a reasonably strong background in literature, psychology, and the visual arts, a woman who has been lucky enough to travel, sometimes for extended intervals, in the eastern world, at this point even pretend to know truly about such experiences other than what I read in books?   It is tempting, of course, to be dishonest in that peculiarly academic way in which I was trained many decades ago: that is, to note apparent evidence of some profound and ancient tradition of thought in, say, a poem by Blake or Frost, quote heavily from secondary and tertiary sources, and–voila!–”New Light on Therayana Buddhism in Blake’s Jerusalem.”
What a relief  at this moment to browse through America Online’s many folders and discover Zyplast 11, one of the latest weapons in the age-old battle to avoid aging, or more accurately, to avoid the awareness of aging.   NEW & IMPROVED WRINKLE ERASERS!  How  can I resist clicking my mouse to bring to screen so crucial  a topic on the  long menu of AOL’s Longevity Club?  Seems as if Zyplast 11, which contains far more collagen per milliliter than its predecessor, will not merely “smoothe the way to a smoother skin” with far greater efficiency but enhance our sense of controlling time through making us appear if not young, then at least not older than the day or week or year before.  “ Polyethylene glycol, or PEG, is. . .active and sticky at both ends, allowing the injected collagen fibers to bond to the host collagen as well as each other” and surely such bonding is what we all need; what’s more the process of extracting the collagen provides a useful “afterlife” for the placentas of newborn human infants instead of the formerly used cow placentas.
One more point for immortality!  Or at least that deathlessness provided by the eternal afterlife, the placenta-heaven of a middle-aged human being’s formerly wrinkled facial skin. But why do I mock such news?  Only because one part of me nags that “ I’m supposed to” if I am a true student of the fantasy of stopped time: after all, every philosophical and religious approach of which I am aware posits a stripping away of body from soul, a movement away from the here and now, the surface, the sheerly material.  And what could be more superficial than skin?  Yet I am fully aware that on a shelf above my bathroom sink even at this moment there sit three jars of expensive wrinkle erasers, one in liquid form, one in jelly form, one in the form of a cream that stings and itches, sometimes turning my skin red and peeling as if I had spent hours lazing in a hot sun, which we all  now know can not only bring on skin cancer but  accelerate the appearance of wrinkles.    Further, at least once each day, no matter how preoccupied I might be with my writing and thinking, I ask myself if it is not time seriously to investigate the possibility of a face-lift.  As T.S. Eliot never said,   I should have been a moth caught in the resin of an ancient Balkan cedar in the forest of my Eastern European ancestors. . .

As I study the tiny moth caught in the brooch I purchased at the New York Museum of Natural History during its recent  show on amber called “Windows to the Past,” I find myself wondering if a human being, a complete human being, had ever been caught in resin and ultimately preserved in a chunk of amber. A museum piece, to be sure,  an artifact in the same general category as the recently discovered frozen mummies  at the summit of Mt. Ampato, a 27,000 foot volcano in the Peruvian Andes, their bodies so beautifully preserved we can study  their clothing’s intricate weaving and ascertain what they ate for their last meal.
Juanita, they named her: Johan Reinhard, the anthropologist who with partner Miguel Zarate discovered and transported the first frozen Inca female.  Because she was naturally rather than artificially mummified with the aid of various potions and chemical brews, Juanita’s body tissues and organs are rife with information about her life, her death (probably through  ritual sacrifice to the local mountain gods), even her long deceased family: “Her DNA should enable us to identify not only the region she came from but also who her relatives are.” (Reinhard, The National Geographic,  vol. 189, no. 6, p. 69.)   Because the extreme cold is such an excellent preservative, the skin-creases around her finger joints, her thigh muscles, and her hair–among other body parts yet to be fully studied–are as vivid as the day she died.
Not long after news about the discovery of Juanita was announced along with a photograph of her delicately featured face, the CEO of a company specializing in genetic research asked if the investigators would be interested in recovering eggs from Juanita’s ovaries, eggs that might likely be intact, given her frozen condition,  and possibly , just possibly, capable of being fertilized by late 20th century human sperm. Given the already heavy agenda of scientific and anthropological studies awaiting Juanita–and presumably given the shaky moral implications of producing a child whose mother has been dead for over 500 years–the investigators refused the offer.  But does not  the assumption that such a retrieval and fertilization of Juanita’s eggs is possible imply that in the broadest expanses of the imagination, mummies such as Juanita are simultaneously dead and alive?
Am I not my DNA?  Even though neither Juanita nor I nor anyone else who has ever lived or will ever live would recognize our DNA in the mirror, so to speak. . .Faintly as I write this I hear the word narcissism, as if some part of my brain were whispering it to another part.  Is the wish for stopped-time merely another guise of that unavoidable fantasy that shines from every reflecting surface, even the handle of a spoon if one is desperate enough to check one’s lipstick in the semi-dark of a mirrorless restaurant, the fantasy that our own self is so powerful  that our own (and, of course, others’) love for it will stop at nothing, even if fated to drown in watery worship of its image?
I am reminded again of amber, of the indirect suggestion in some of the literature accompanying the Museum of Natural History’s exhibit,  that amber has had a peculiar pull on the human imagination not only because of its beauty but because of its appeal, on the basis of the swarms of ancient insects and plants encased within, to the  fantasy to stop, or at least anneal, time. . . perhaps maybe as well to bring back to life the only seemingly lifeless?
summers ago, every kid on the block was talking about dinosaurs, amber, and DNA, courtesy of Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park,” a movie which, unfortunately for science for fortunately for box offices around the world, gave way to a dinosaur stampede worthy of the wildest old Western.  And why not?  Even if the movie had explored further the scientific validity of reviving and then reproducing the DNA of amber-encased bacteria and viruses, it would have been on shaky ground indeed. So far the possibility of actual “ rebirth “ is  highly uncertain despite the lure of  “reviving” the moth or ant trapped through amber formation in a moment of time so many eons ago it is difficult to imagine what even the trees must then have looked like.  From a very much lay point of view, I imagine that fertilizing one of Juanita’s eggs has a slightly more likely chance of success.
Indeed,  even a revived moth might find life in the very late 20th century somewhat disturbing: what to make of artificial light, for example, or industrial pollution?  But , once again, how tempting to believe that a particular creature, this time a creature embedded in amber is, like Schrodinger’s cat, both dead and alive. A highly visible metaphor of stopped time, to be sure.For, if decay of earthly matter is a primary marker of death, the embedded creature certainly has avoided that  fate. And since its lack of decay has been achieved naturally, without the benefit of  highly cosmetic chemical potions, does it not then follow that the moth or ant or even frog  is more “alive” than the best preserved mummies? That it, admittedly through no act of its own volition, has succeeded in stopping time?
Back to Schrodinger’s cat.  In the words again of George Johnson: “We are asked to imagine a cat trapped in a box with a glass vial of poison.  Nearby lies a chunk of radioactive material, like uranium. If an atom of the uranium decays, an electronic detector will trip a hammer that smashes the vial and kills the cat. . ./but/ uranium atoms, unlike marbles or baseballs, cannot be said to be in a definite state–decayed or undecayed–until they are observed.  /italics added/ Before that, the atoms hover in a quantum limbo, stuck in both possible states at the same time. Thus, it is only when we open the box and make the observation that the uranium emerges from this nether world and makes up its mind. So why can’t the same be said for the poor cat?   Until we lift the lid and peer inside. . .the hapless creature will be both dead and alive. . . .An uranium atom may have indeed decayed, spilling the poison, but it will be our observation that kills the cat.”
Unfortunately, after this lucid explanation, Johnson’s  article goes on at once to note that Schrodinger was merely pulling a prank on some of the mystical thinkers of his time, especially their narcissistic reliance on human observation as the determinant of whether something is or is not real.  No wonder, in a rather unpleasant dream last night, I was flying low over vividly green rice paddies, presumably somewhere in Indonesia. But my companions on the plane were either aloof or downright hostile; I felt terribly hot but was unable to remove my heavy jeans so I could change into some more appropriate clothing; my arms were so painfully paralyzed I could not reach for the food the leader of our “expedition” had supplied.   Despite my entreaties, no one would tell me over what specific places we were flying.  Either they didn’t know or didn’t care, and became annoyed with me merely for asking such a stupid question.  But worst of all, when I finally struggled to open a small carry-on bag, the kitten I had packed inside (and forgotten about) tumbled out on the floor of the plane, if not dead, then very nearly so, its labored and intermittent breathing as well as its refusal to eat warning me that soon I would be faced with the sad task of observing the young cat die; moreover, I would have to jettison its body out a window of the plane.
Fortunately, I woke up before having to perform such a distasteful act, and in the process, never learning if the dream-cat was dead or alive.  Perhaps it was merely hibernating?  Or since the flight was clearly taking place in summer,  engaging in the reverse activity of aestivating, when a few creatures, mostly worm-like,  lapse into a quasi-sleep after seeking shelter from excessive heat or light, only to reappear  reinvigorated in the fall.   Even as I write this, my poor young cat might well have rallied and be scampering around the plane in a most animated manner. Scant comfort, nonetheless;  a more comical version of the peculiar comfortlessness experienced when our dreams are visited by a person we know is dead, for even in such common dreams, we know such moments are wishes doomed not only to disappear with the dream but to make us feel all the more bereft when we wake up.  Imagination has its disillusions as well as its far more numerous delights.

More than a century ago today on New York’s Lower East Side, my  maternal grandfather Joseph Nisenson, recently emigrated from Vilna, married my grandmother, Anna Bauer, recently emigrated from Pinsk.  Their parents, numerous sisters and brothers, and new-world friends attended the crowded ceremony, which took place in a small Jewish wedding chapel on Orchard Street.   I can imagine the music, the dancing, the outfits, exactly what the slivovitz tasted like and the pickled herring that accompanied it.  But I do not imagine I was there.  Nor do I for a moment imagine that anyone present imagines first my mother’s birth, five years later, and my own birth, some 30 years later.  Let alone what I am like now.  Not one person.  Is the impossibility of imagining myself remotely present in any way the reason my reconstruction of their wedding is not a moment of stopped-time, but rather a jerky, spasmodic movie in my head, possibly less accurate than a dream?  Which leads me to an odd thought: is  recapturing the  moment of one’s conception  the true aim of the desire for stopped-time?  One’s conception, not the subsequent division of one’s cells into teeth, hair, eyes, toes, etc.; one’s conception, not one’s birth, which is anything but a frozen moment.

Assume for a moment there exists in molecular form somewhere in the universe a raw, shapeless memory of the moment we were conceived.  Assume further that the moment is retrievable even if it could not possibly be imprinted in our brain cells since those cells did not exist except in potentia the moment one of our father’s sperm cells penetrated the rind of our mother’s egg: would not the captured moment, in all its glory, be but the image of an unrepeatable  event, not a timeless event at all?  Which leads to yet another illusion of stopped-time, that conjured by repetition in as unvarying a form as possible of a particular past experience, whether through a quirky individual repetition-compulsion or a grand ritual replete with candles, incense,  a burst of music, the stunning play of light upon gold.  As if one could obliterate the passage of time between, say, last Christmas and this one; as if in those twelve months nobody had died, nobody had been born, no new withers had appeared on anybody’s skin, no cells had divided and subdivided, not even a single twig had been blown loose from the tree across the way.      The fantasy is tempting.   Yet such a fantasy is by no means the sole reason: why else do we have a need to return to houses we have lived in decades ago, if we are lucky enough even to find such places; to watch an old movie over and over again, the script so familiar we can recite the lines before the actors do so, watch Bergman and Bogart depart from each other on that railroad car as we weep in unison with the Paris rain; to engage over and over in an activity that is thoroughly predictable, such as long-married sex or watching, as if mesmerized, an ad or, for that matter, most programs on TV.
I receive another snapshot of my grandson,  again in that same Central Park swing. Again he is laughing but this time the swing is in its backward position, about to be pushed  by his father.  Probably my grandson is laughing from anticipation of the joyful ride forward he is about to experience, or more accurately, re-experience, his anticipation made possible by memory of many other such exciting arcked journeys up, up towards the trees and curving, sometimes even lurching, back again for another push.  Wonderful snapshot–but hardly a repetition of the earlier mentioned photo.  Even the leaves on the trees look different, having turned larger and a richer green in the week or so of early spring days separating the two moments.
Some time ago I had my own experience with the repeatable moment.  Or more accurately with indulging in the illusion of such in order to convince myself, ever so briefly and with the help of much vodka and wine, that one could, indeed, stop time.  The moment involved a particular island in Casco Bay, Maine; a particular person; a particular meal at a particular table by a particular window; the passage of a ferry at a particular time.
For a few years, a friend and I rented a small island that had only one wooden cottage; no electricity, no plumbing, no neighbors.  With little else to do but gaze at the ocean and the dance-patterns of the gulls, perhaps pick some wild berries or climb the rocks in the cove searching for driftwood,  shortly after arrival on the island I fell into a trance-like state, fully conscious of my surroundings, but convinced –especially on the many foggy mornings–that they were self-contained.  The rest of the world, the rest of my life, existed, of course, but only as an abstraction; even familiar faces were hard to conjure up as the small island itself became a sometimes eerie combination of the real and imagined.  Despite the tranquility of the place, each time I arrived, starting with the second visit, I felt a peculiar anxiety about time. The house was the same, down to the exact location of the white mixing bowl, the old leather couch with its crackled cushions and claw feet, the ancient hurricane lamps, the pinned-up maritime maps, thanks to the fastidiousness of the owners from whom we had rented the place. But on the wall just opposite the front door, as if in mockery, there stared the same mirror, its common sense wooden frame making it seem all the more powerful.  Hello, island.  Hello, cottage. Hello, face in the mirror, one year older than the last time you were reflected in all your silvery exactness in that same glass.
Hence the ritual dinner.  While never consciously planned as such, the dinner  always  unfolded the same as the first time: we would sit at either end of the pine slab that served as the kitchen table; look with pleasure at the white platter on which there sat three bright red barely dead steamed lobsters; the ritual bottle of  Merlot ; a salad and a  loaf of blueberry bread.  My friend would pour the wine, I would slice the bread, and as we extracted the first  smoothe white flesh from the lobster claws,  a fog horn would sound and out the large kitchen window we could see the Scotia Prince, the nightly ferry from Portland to Nova Scotia,  cross Casco Bay in the early stages of its journey east.  The hell with the mirror, with the new face-cracks and neck-sags it revealed; the hell with the battery radio that chattered the time, weather, and latest murders; the hell even with the weather itself  (I recall that at least twice the skies were a menacing gray rather than the cerulean blue I used to paint this scene): this was the repeatable moment!  And if it was repeatable, no time has passed since the last such occasion.  Right?  No time had passed because I said so, and, to a lesser extent, my friend agreed.   Lobster, Merlot, the Scotia Princess. . .until death do us part.
It is now more than ten years since I have seen that island.  Probably I will never see it again, let alone walk upon it.  My friend and I have long since parted ways.  In recent years, the lobster crop has been scanty and very expensive.  Red tide has affected the coast of Maine, rendering inedible any mussels one might find.  If I searched hard enough, I could probably find the Merlot.  Someone who later rented the island has told me the white platter broke beyond repair.  And the company that runs the ferry from Maine to Nova Scotia has changed its schedule.
But what, you might well ask at this point, of more controlled, less capricious repeatable moments, time-honored ritual events like a mass, a Shabbat service, or any religious ritual than follows predictable rules in a particular pattern and locale?  It is my own belief that though less obviously so,  such events are subject to the same rules of mutability  as the lobster dinner and snapshots of my grandson: natural rules that transcend any man-made rules concerned with the order of prayers, their particular content, the melody in which a particular prayer is chanted,
sung, uttered.  Similar but not the same. This week at church, Mrs.Stickney might be wearing a green rayon dress with small daisies around the neckline;  while singing a hymn she might be thinking about a report she must complete by tomorrow for her advanced computer seminar at the local community college.  Next week she wears black and wonders what her husband is   doing on his business trip to Ocean City; the week after she is not there at all, having been struck by a hit-run driver while crossing Little Falls Parkway, et al. Similar but not the same.  Though judging by the popularity of ritual events, and I speak not only of the religious, the lure to repeat a past occasion is strong indeed.  Think of any holiday, but especially holidays that commemorate a particular event: the 4th of July, Bastille Day, Veteran’s Day (which used to mark the anniversary of the end of World War 1).  More or less enjoyable occasions, at least in what time remains from shopping for sales–a relatively recent accoutrement of nearly every American holiday–but still not candidates for stopped-time. . .even if Cousin Harry always spills red Manischewitz all over the same white linen tablecloth at the Passover seder.
***
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***
How could I in those years on the island in Maine have fooled myself with such a contrived effort to attain the repeatable moment?  At best, I might have attained a measure of predictability, a more predictable than usual few moments: the lobster, the white platter, the ferry to Nova Scotia. . .
Likewise the far less private rituals, such as  religious ceremonies: despite their ancient roots, the frequent beauty of their songs and chants, the incense and candeflames, they, too, are marked by predictability, no matter how much they might  seem to replicate a ceremony once celebrated by distant ancestors.  That such relative predictability  strongly appeals to the human psyche I have no doubt, but  it is folly to confuse that appeal with the wish for stopped-time.  To partake in a ceremony whose shapes and images are relatively predictable is especially appealing at the present time, when change, ranging from the trivial–hey, what happened to that nice old building? I’m sure it was there yesterday–to the profound–so the sun may not be a star after all?–is  so constant, it would have driven our village ancestors mad.
Perhaps it is the color of the sky  tonight that reawakens the coin fantasy; in any case, while I continued to   I keep seeing myself as a young girl, standing on a dirt-covered bridge many miles and years away, then tossing the penny into the swiftly flowing creek below.  Someone older and wiser was with me.  Perhaps my Aunt Millie?  What excitement to run to the other side of the bridge and see my penny reappear after only about thirty seconds!  Reappear just as shiny on the other side!
The next day I went back to the bridge all by myself, clutching another penny I had cajoled out of my mother, presumably so I could play some game with a pink rubber ball.  Again I tossed the penny into the creek, again rushed across the bridge to see my penny reappear on the other side.  Never one to be content with a simple success, I began to toss other items:  the cap from a milk bottle, a black-eyed susan still attached to its stem, a slip of paper.  All of them worked, though none excited me as much as the coin, which, in retrospect, had become more important to me than the swiftness of the creekwater, the ever-flowing water that from Thales and Heraclitus on men have linked with ever-flowing time, the great flux.  My coin had survived; it was not lost at all, only someplace else, someplace else in that lovely cool green water.  In my childish way,  was I not uniting as one and the same both coin (moment, self) and water (ongoing time, other)?
For a long time I keep thinking only about the coin and the creek.  So time itself is the answer; grasping  the paradox of time itself the only possible answer to the illusion of stopped-time and all the contrived efforts to achieve the latter?
Yes, there are problems. What if I had tossed a rock into the creek, a rock that sank immediately to the bottom  of the creek, which itself, like all surfaces of water, remembers nothing.  But surely the rock would have resurfaced from the silt and pebbles, lost socks and skeletal fish, sooner or later.  Mostly later, perhaps centuries or eons later.  But still there was a good natural chance it would resurface.
Another problem: what if the reappeared coin was considerably changed from the original, its rim nicked, its surface now partially tinted a phthalo-green tint from the creek’s algae?  But for the amateur artist that I was and am, such variation would only render the coin that much more interesting.  Granted, I might feel differently if I were a coin-collector, more interested in the coin’s man-made designs than any serendipitous contributions from nature.
Ah, but what if the coin had been nearly crushed into scrap from some powerful surge of natural energy, a tsunami produced by a seaquake or underwater volcanic eruption?  I say  now with only minor hesitation: perhaps sometime another little girl, another coin clutched in her hand and she herself standing by another bridged creek,  will have better luck.
Suddenly I can smell the twisted rope that my grandfather had hung from a chestnut tree and nailed to a board which became my own swing.  How I loved to further twist each rope by plaiting one with the other,  spinning myself in circles, and then the real fun: letting the ropes separate and with a sharp snapping sound spin me back to where I could start  the whole thing over again.  I am convinced for a while that deep in a dark corner or a drawer there exists a crackled, brown-gray snapshot of myself, age about 4 or 5, on that swing, but no matter how hard I search I cannot find any such proof.  Did that snapshot, indeed, never exist at all?  Has it been lost over the decades?  Is it stuck between the pages of an album with which I am so familiar I never bother anymore to open its cover?   Or in a frame hung on the wall right in front of my eyes, so close and familiar I never look there anymore, just as one ceases  after a while to look much at a favorite painting in one’s home, even if the painting was created by a close friend or by oneself. Or did the old Brownie Reflex run out of film just before someone decided to preserve my moment on the swing?

________________

PEACOCKS, MIRRORS, PARADISE
They make me think about Flannery O’Connor living on her mother’s peacock farm in Georgia; about a street market in the southwest of China, selling the most ample peacock feathers I’d ever seen; about all those things that appear to be exotic but are in reality quite nasty.  Pokeweed berries that bloom in brilliant purples and magentas every fall, each berry packed with poison;   lush sumac;  polluted water that resembles absinthe;  oil rainbows shining in the streets after a rain. . . The peacock’s dual nature is clearly expressed in an Indonesian legend where the peacock is guardian at the gate of paradise, but cunningly allows the devil to enter by eating him, flesh and bone.
Yet peacocks were deemed sacred to Hera; depicted as magical steeds at Angkor Wat;  privileged, in Christian iconography, to drink from the eucharistic chalice. Indeed, there seems to have been no major culture (except, however,  the ancient Hebrews) that did not at least admire the peacock, if not worship it for the beauty of its tail in particular.  Because of their preening habits, peacocks have also frequently been linked with vanity.
***
Adrienne Rich once said that women are so conditioned to check their physical appearance, they cannot refrain from catching a glimpse of themselves in the reflections of store windows, sheet metal, even the handles of table knives and the backs of spoons.
But it was men who made the first known mirrors from polished bronze or copper in Egypt and the Indus Valley nearly 3000 years before Christ and a couple of millennia later in China’s  Shang Dynasty.  Even Moses found mirrors of value,  not so much for self-gazing as for enhancing  the Tabernacle.  To be fair, the mirrors he used were donated by women who had presumably discovered such in Egypt.  No such excuses, however,  for Roman emperors. Primitive versions of glass mirrors not only facilitated their self-admiration but quelled paranoid fantasies; e.g.the Emperor Domitian lined all the walls of his palace gallery with mirrors so no enemy might sneak behind him.  Narcissism and paranoia are, of course, closely related states of mind.
***
The campus of my alma mater, Smith College, contains a small body of water called Paradise Pond.  In Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie,” the narrator speaks of the Paradise Dance Alley, whose tango and waltz rhythms drifted from open windows . Is there not more than one  condominium called Paradise Gardens,  Paradise Hotel,  Paradise Chinese restaurant, Paradise Travel Agency in every American state as well as most foreign countries?   At least one Paradise Beach, located on island of Mykonos, is famous as a particularly naughty nudist colony.  There are over 20 towns named Paradise in the United States, and by no means are all of them in California. The bronze-panelled doors of the great cathedral of Florence are known in English as The Gates of Paradise. Popular singers have crooned about how they’ll build a stairway to Paradise and lamented being strangers in that much celebrated place, wherever it might be or have been or whether it is even a place at all but rather a condition of the mind–despite numerous descriptions of paradisial settings, particularly gardens that are set off from the rest of the world.  Indeed, the word itself comes from the Persian word for enclosure.  (Notable exceptions to paradise as an enclosed garden: the Christian notion of the New Jerusalem as a city and the Celtic underwater paradise).
Of course,  there are numerous gaps in the enclosing walls, both actual and symbolic; one can be allowed entrance but can also, like Adam and Eve, be purged forever. Indeed, one  inevitably be purged from paradise, for the sine qua non of any paradise is its mutability.  Which may not be such a bad thing:   as Baudelaire claimed,  “les vrai paradis sont les paradis perdus .”  Lost to all but memory. . .
***
The peacock’s tail is distinguished by its many colorful “eyes.”  In Greek mythology, it was Hera who scattered the bird’s fan-shaped tail with eyes after the death of her protege, Argus the All-Seeing, who allegedly had one hundred eyes located all over his body. His multiplicity of eyes alludes to the multiplicity of stars, a linkage represented as well by the Hindu god Indra.
The lure of multiple eyes is, in fact, a frequent theme in both Hinduism and its derivatives: the presence of a third or inner eye that projects vision from within the mind to external objects occurs in the  Bhagavad-Gita and such an eye also serves as an important chakra in Kundalini Hinduism, the hidden extra eye capable of perceiving a deeper reality than a person’s ordinary two eyes.  No surprise that in both Hinduism and Buddhism the peacock was linked with watchfulness as well as wisdom; indeed, in Tamil,  the language of South India, the words for eye and wisdom are identical.  And though it has become primarily an aesthetic ritual,  Hindu women still at times attach a black or red eye-like patch or jewel to the forehead.
In Islam, the peacock’s eyes are equivalent with the eyes [sic]of the heart–again true vision is believed to be inner vision, a concept that in the west goes back to Empedocles and Plato, who linked the projective inner eye with light and fire.   In Christianity, the peacock’s multiple eyes symbolize the all-seeing and all-knowing divinity.   (Those rare instances when a human being is  born with cyclopism or an extra eye unfortunately manifest the exact opposite of wisdom; the condition is a serious aberration and no such person has survived more than a day, though numerous amphibians, fish, and reptiles possess a multitude of eyes.  No birds. However, Gustav Klimt’s highly stylized figures, whose gowns he decorated with multiple eye-like ovals, often evoke the gaudy exoticism of peacocks).
***
Originally not only the eyes but mirrors, too, were linked with stars, specifically with the early study of stars as reflected in mirrors. The backs of Chinese bronze mirrors were sometimes embossed with schema of the cosmos, particularly juxtapositions of the circular heaven,which the enlightened eye can perceive as the realm of truth, and the square earth, realm of appearance and deception.
Mirrors, of course, always involve the eyes’ capacity to see, and not just in the narcissistic sense of seeing whether or not we look beautiful.  Ideally, the eye can achieve a vision of a true rather than disguised or fanciful reality, eventually an awareness of the true nature of the inner soul.
In particular, Muslim literature refers to magic mirrors by means of which one can see past, present, and future. . .Betrothed couples in some Islamic countries first meet by entering a room from opposite doors and looking not at each other but at their respective mirror images.  According to  The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, “in so doing they will meet as if they were in Paradise [italics added], seeing their faces corrected and not inverted as in this world” (p.660).  (Other traditions, however, link the mirror with the negative implications of inversion or reversals).
Mirrors and peacocks are jointly present in a Persian legend which claims that the gods first created the spirit in the shape of a peacock, then allowed the latter to look upon its image in a special divine mirror, whereupon the peacock was so suffused with awe it began to sweat profusely.  From the beads of this ample sweat all other beings were then created. . .One wonders, however, if the peacock experienced its awesome epiphany when looking simply with its “regular” eyes or the multiple eyes lavishly scattered over its tail.
At the opposite extreme, Sylvia Plath’s mirror-as-narrator calls itself  “the eye of a little god, four-cornered, “ conjuring an image of the god as one-eyed–or so powerful as a revealer and protector of truth that it needs only one eye (Plath, “Mirror”).  Conversely, the poem suggests that those who worship the mirror as if it were a god are only capable of seeing with one eye. . .
***
If paradise exists primarily in memory, it is the visual aspect of memory that is primarily engaged in its evocation.  Must the evocation describe an actual place or event?  Ideally, yes, if any given individual is to benefit from a particular recalled experience.   But so commonplace are the archetypes of paradise that it is markedly difficult to avoid coloring one’s memory with paints from the palette of those traditional legends. If not literally, then at least symbolically. . .
So even if someone has never entered a formal garden, the visual details of paradise are likely to involve at least one tree, a number of lakes or rivers (or an island in the sea), succulent  flowers and fruits, possibly a distant mountain range.  Always the season is spring and always it is daytime,  probably early afternoon.  Gems of various shapes and hues hang from trees and flow molten in spiraling streams; always the air is redolent with perfume, often musk.
Let’s not forget the soft music, counterpointed with the twitter of birds and the voices of angels. . .If there are animals, they are gentle and exotically colored–like peacocks and carousel horses.  Serpents? Don’t they really belong to hell, to dystopias,  and to all the other opposites of paradise? (Translation: even if that lovingly remembered picnic was ruined by nasty insects and poison ivy, in memory,  sight of the green fan-shaped leaves of the chestnut trees that surrounded the picnic grove override the stings of the insects, even the annoying chatter of relatives, the stickiness of the spilled lemonade. . .)
If my description of a typical paradise sounds like I’m describing a theme park, so be it. While in the past one had only to consider the written or oral description of the Biblical Eden (or its cultural equivalent) it is now impossible to blind oneself to the the Disneyfication of paradise, whether the images are derived from movies, TV, commercials, or the many actual “disneys” located well beyond the borders of California or Florida.  Ask people to name a specific place they identify with paradise and the likely answer is the Hollywood version of Hawaii or the islands of the South Pacific.  All of which seriously interferes with the value of memory for synthesizing and ultimately reconciling our inborn human wishes for eternal adoration and, of course, immortality,  with the inevitable disappointments and inevitable sorrows of any given life.

But so many others have commented about the desire to return to a Golden Age, exemplified by the womb, the Elysian Fields, El Dorado, the Promised Land,  lost subterranean kingdoms, etc., that reiteration would be pointless.   Nor is there any point belaboring the universal tendency towards nostalgia, even though nostalgia comes in many varieties.
What concerns me here is the possibility that those brief and elusive journeys into one’s individual  memory–I speak here about good memories primarily–quickly give way to some prepaid guided tours to cookie-cutter versions of paradise (“all the comforts of home!”) so that little or nothing is left for the achievement of wisdom.  Instead, the effort is supplanted by escape into prepackaged memories, a false nostalgia as it were, substituting a few easy moments of “feeling good” for the difficulties of locating and ultimately reconciling any given individual’s disparity between the wished-for and the actual.
The difference is akin to that between, say, Bing Crosby longing for “the blues of the night and the golds of the day” and country singer Jimmie Rogers recalling old days riding the railroads.  But I see the eyes have given way to the ears. . .
***
Supposedly peacocks become restless when it is about to rain; hence the traditional, Burmese Peacock Dance to invoke an end to drought and the sacrifice of a peacock to encourage the same end.  Paradoxically, in the way of all legends and superstitions, peacocks are also associated, particularly in Buddhism, with fire and the color red.  And the magnificence of their plumage results from their ability to transmute poisons (like swallowed serpents) into manifestations of beauty.  Skanda, the Hindu god of war represented into the stones of Angkor Wat as the rider of peacock steeds, could himself transform poisons into a beverage conferring immortality. And Christians connected peacocks with the resurrection, since the birds incorruptible and hence immortal.  (Yes, people have at times roasted and consumed the flesh of peacocks, possibly to absorb the DNA of immortality, but presumably their gustatory appeal is limited. No cuisine I’m aware of contains recipes for peacock pot pie or fried peacock wings).
Peacock feathers are valued as emblems of royalty and insurers of good luck, especially in China and the Middle East–though the Shah of Iran’s Peacock Throne must have been contaminated by other-birdly forces.
***
Mirrors have been long associated with divination and magical evocation.  J. E. Cirlot notes the belief that mirrors can conjure apparitions by “returning” images they have incorporated in the past  ( A Dictionary of Symbols, tr. John Sage, London, 1971.)  A related illusion is the mirror’s ability to reflect a distant object now far removed.
Magical mirrors invented over 1500 years ago in China long baffled western scientists.  These ordinary looking bronze mirrors cast on a wall an image of the design embossed on their reverse side, suggesting a passage of light through the bronze.  Not until 1932 did a British crystallographer, Sir William Bragg, discover with the aid of a microscope that “minute wrinkles” on the polished side of such a  mirror replicated the design on its reverse surface.
We all know about the likelihood of seven years of bad luck that will follow the breaking of a mirror.  Other mirror superstitions include the practice in southwest China of placing mirrors on the outsides of houses in order to ward off evil spirits before they can enter; observant Jews cover mirrors with shrouds or sheets after someone has died, lest the mirror return the ghost of the deceased.  In regard to birth, mirrors are linked with the not necessarily magical but still remarkable phenomenon of twins, especially identical twins.  Or one may pass through the mirror as a gateway to rebirth–e.g. Alice’s journey through the looking glass.
***
Less directly, to be sure,  the rhetoric of paradise can be used magically as a means of political control,  much as a magician employs the tricks of his trade to convince an audience of some nonsensical act, like escape from a sealed coffin.  First he will soften their skepticism with some well-planned entertainment, jokes, music, etc.  In such ways have dictators lulled their audiences and then convinced them of the possibility of some utopian vision if only they would join forces with him. . .See Thomas Mann’s “Mario and the Magician.”  And countless novels concerned with technological utopias, synonymous with technological paradises, have stressed the   reliance on methods of persuasion suffused with magical tricks: use of drugs and music to create the proper mood, promises upon promises of a better, indeed a perfect or even immortal, life; emphasis on the golden future that will replace the heavily tarnished past if only one obeys the commands of the self-anointed superman who will lead the way.
***
Of modern poets, Wallace Stevens was most captivated by peacocks, probably because of the exoticism evoked by their brilliant coloration, an exoticism inspired in part by expressionist and symbolist painting.  In “Domination of Black,” he claims: “. . .but the color of the heavy hemlocks/Came striding./And I remembered the cry of the peacocks./ The colors of their tails/Were like the leaves themselves/Turning in the wind. . .I heard them cry–the peacocks./ Was it a cry against the twilight/Or against the leaves themselves. .
As the poem progresses, peacocks and hemlocks are fused, but the unity is frightening rather than reassuring: “I saw how the night came,/Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks./ I felt afraid./And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.”
In the more elusive “Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks” the narrator, himself from the Land of Peacocks,  encounters a mysterious “Beserk” in a dream that invokes a sense of dread; once again the alluring peacock is to be feared–perhaps because its very plenitude of color carries the implicit threat of nothingness, a blankness reminiscent of the French symbolist poet Julius Laforgue’s complaint about feeling sad because  “des paons reveille fait que plus rien n’existe!” –  roughly translated as  “the peacocks remind us that only nothingness exists.”
Much less fraught with alarm is John Ruskin’s comment in The Stones of Venice: “Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless: peacocks and lilies, for instance.”
***
Mirror images abound in early Chinese proverbs: e.g.,  “Flowers in a mirror or the moon in the stream, “  a reference to the insubstantial and illusionary;  “ Two broken pieces of mirror coming together again./Old lovers reunited,”  alluding to a legend of two departing lovers who break a mirror in half so they if they meet again they will have a means of proving their identity, the mirror in this case symbolizing uniqueness.  (Selected Chinese Sayings, ed. T.C. Lai, Hong Kong: 1960).

***
“Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the United States is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise: mournful, monotonous, superficial. . .”–Jean Baudrillard,  America: Utopia Achieved
“Paradise is where I am.”--Voltaire
Rather than pay last minute homage to John  Milton or The Book of Genesis, I note here the Chinese image of paradise as a cluster of pearls  –an  image related to the Buddhist concept of the pearl itself as a Third Eye.
A cluster of eyes, all pure and self-luminous:  what better way to transcend the convention of paradise as an enclosed garden of the mind so that we may speak of the mind’s multiplicity of inner eyes, the eyes that enable us to remember and to imagine.
______________________________

SWANS, TRICKSTERS, THE  LETTER  S

A cob, a pen  a cygnet;  a Trumpeter Swan, a Mute Swan, a Black-Necked Swan: it
didn’t matter which one even though cobs were always male, pens female, and cygnets juveniles with gray plumage.  When I first read “The Ugly Duckling,” I wished only that one day I, too, would be transformed into a swan.  I was scarcely the first person to be fascinated by these elegant, often wild, sometimes dangerous waterfowl, dangerous because a Trumpeter Swan, when approached too closely, can beat someone to death with its powerful wings.
Is it the whiteness of their feathers; the green of their eggs; the knobbiness of their bills; the length and gracefulness of their necks; the mysteries of their migratory habits or of their ability to arch their wings and glide clear across a lake or pond that have for centuries made swans so appealing they are the subjects of countless myths and legends?
Certainly it is not their music.  The notion of a swan breaking into song just prior to death is precisely that, a mere notion–despite evidence that none less than Aristotle claimed it to be true, despite the persistence of the term “swan song” to indicate all manner of farewells and last acts. The misnamed Mute Swans do make a sort of singing noise when they move their feathers in flight in order to communicate with the rest of the flock; moreover, according to a BBC educational program, they “also emit . . .quiet grunts, throaty gurgles and honks and they hiss loudly when agitated.”   But no terminal melodies.
Probably the cygnet’s remarkable transformation from a dumpy gray-feathered bird to a long-necked white or black adult accounts best for the widespread allure of swans.  This ability accounts as well for their associations with peril, bad omens, the mystery of death.
***
Transformation to a gliding swan would rank high if I were given a chance to shift to another form, at least temporarily.  But a few days as a leopard would also be appealing or perhaps as a willow tree, my long green hair swaying with the wind.  Come to think of it, why not follow the path of Gluskap, a god of the North American forests, who could make himself a cloud or a water eddy, even dust-in-sunlight?  Or, like the Hindu Apsara dancers, become a rainbow? Better yet, mimic the African sky spirit Annency who just for the hell of it could become not just a tiger but the yellow of a tiger’s eye; the blue of the sky as reflected in water; pure iridescence like that produced by the sun on the surface of a dew-drop.
Students of mythology call such legendary figures shape- shifters or shape-changers.  Often they are creator gods as well, capable of assuming the forms of what they created, ranging from such animals as lizards, ravens, and kangaroos to grains of corn or puffs of smoke. Luke, an ancient Nordic god who existed prior to the very notion of existence, contained in his ample bag of tricks the ability to become a blush on the face of a fair young maiden, all the better to seduce her.
***
If a swan were a letter of the alphabet surely in the Roman alphabet, that letter would be S;  a letter whose shape suggests the rhythms of continuous motion; kin to the scroll, the universal spiral, the whirlpool, the whirlwind, the waxing and waning moon, a meandering stream.  The closest Greek equivalent would be the sigma :  granted such a swan would be considerably more angular than its Roman version.  In the Hebrew alphabet, the lamed might do, especially for a swan who has suffered the misfortune of a  lopped-off head.
Whether vertical or horizontal, the S shape evokes images of alternating phases, not only of the moon, but of the seasons, of the commingling of heaven and earth, evolution and involution. The art of ornamentation is rife with variations of the S, particularly in Persian, Turkish, and Celtic designs.  And if we flip an S around, adding a little curve of a tail, we have the zodiacal sign of Leo, linked with fire, the sun, the power of the will.
Swan-maidens are abundant in Celtic and Teutonic legends.  One of the best known is The Dream of Angus, in which one Angus Ma Ox falls in love with his dream vision of a beautiful girl.   When he visits the lake where she lives, he sees her among 150 other young women, each connected to another by a silver chain.  Alas, they alternate each year between human and swan form, and can only be loved in their swan phase.  So?  The astute young man learns that the ritual shape-changing occurs always at the Feast of Simon, returns to the lake at the appropriate time, sees a flock of white swans with silvery chains around their heads, and calls out the name of his beloved, who agrees to fly off with him on the condition he, too, is willing to change himself into a swan. Of course. And so the two fly off together into the Celtic sky (after circling three times).
In other versions, the swan-maiden can change her form at will with the help of a magical garment, usually a feather robe. Should her future mate find the robe and ask its purpose, she must change back into a swan and fly off forever into the unknown. Interpretations include the conflict between the swan’s desire to stay in a particularly place and the need to migrate; also a parallel between the loss of the robe and the process of moulting.  In legends from Central Asia,  the swan-maiden is a demon who drinks the blood of the dead.
Male versions of the motif, or swan-knights, are usually associated with boats or chariots. Well known because of Wagner’s opera, Lohengrin was such a  knight, his journey analogous with legends of the Greek sun-gods. (Apollo, for one, travelled in a chariot drawn by swans).  I think as I write this of the swan boats in which my children and I paddled around the waters of the Boston Common. .  .
Some families of the Rhineland actually claimed descent from a swan-knight;  in Brandenburg, they created  the Order of the Swan.  And though in the Hebrides’ Isle of Skye, swans allegedly rescued human babies, wrapping them in shawls of feathers and carrying them in “nests” of twisted nettles, swans are regarded as ominous in Scotland where they are thought to this day to embody the souls of the dead.  Perhaps some of the rescued babies never returned?
***
One of the most fascinating shape-shifters is the African creator-spirit Dxui.  His method of creating various animals and plants involved actually becoming the created object, one object at a time. Thus he might briefly become a flower, but for reasons unbeknownst–possibly boredom–he would leave his imprint on its petals, moving on to become, say, a tiger; in turn, perhaps a rock, a bird, a grain of sand in the desert.
Imagine the implications for  human creators: today I shall literally create and become the clay of a pot, the very stuff of my being coiled or shaped on a wheel, fired in a kiln, glazed, set out to dry.  After a spell of experiencing the world as a pot–does it really welcome being filled with water or used as a cooking vessel?–I inscribe it with my initials and leave it behind, having decided now to create a mosaic.  Not only does my flesh and blood turn gold, but I become, in turn, each of the mosaic’s luminous angels.   Then move on perhaps to become each note in, say, Beethoven’s
Choral Fantasy. . .or each streak on the body of a dung-worm.
***
The letter S has been associated with the shape of the lyre, with water, with thin clouds. Reversed and crossed in the middle by two parallel lines, it is the alchemist’s sign for oil; flipped onto its back and preceded by a plus sign, it’s the alchemist’s sign for arsenic.  Though associated with lead in early charts of the elements, it was linked by mystics with saintliness, solar worship, and the very essence of the spirit.
Its closest numerical cousin is the number 8, whose horizontal version represents infinity.  The sign for the American dollar, $, derives from its association with that number: originally a symbol for the Spanish peso, equal in value to 8 reals or pieces-of-eight, it first was shaped like a blend of a P and and 8; later the P was dropped and the 8 bordered on each side by a diagonal line: /8/. Still later the lines were superimposed upon the 8, which, according to John Fitzpatrick, author of “The Spanish Galleon and Pieces-of-Eight” in Scribner’s Magazine, was carelessly written to resemble an S.  Finally, the lines were superimposed upon an S curled at each end so the new symbol resembled a fusion of the U and the S, appropriate enough for the United States of America.
An ordinary S all by itself is the official American meteorological sign for a sandstorm.
***
“Swan Upping,” the purpose of which is to record the number of swans on the river and to mark or pinion the cygnets to indicate ownership, still takes place each summer on the River Thames.  The ritual is linked with the swan’s status as Britain’s royal bird; all swans, even those at liberty or in common waters, belong to the Crown or to companies of the Vintners and Dyers.  Sometimes the Crown granted ownership privileges to swans in common waters, but if the bird strayed, ownership reverted to the Crown in a year and a day.  As royal birds, swans were prized as gifts and consumed at banquets and Christmas dinners.
After the swan was officially declared royal in 1482, “swan motes” and “Swanning Courts” were established to enforce the swan laws.  To this day there is a Master of the Swans, responsible for supervising all swans in the kingdom.  In the five days of the actual “Upping,” the overseers travel in wooden boats, once elaborately decorated for the purpose.  Birds are removed from the river’s water in order to be marked so as to distinguish ownership, the marks accomplished by cutting or branding on the mandible, leg, foot, or wing; sometimes beak marks are cut with a sharp knife that produced a scar.  Pinioning, or clipping the swan’s wings so it could not fly, was declared illegal in 1978 because of protests from animal rights groups, but the overall ritual of marking continues to this day –much to the consternation of the latter.
The eating of swan has, however, for the most part become unpopular.  As far back as 1738,  swan’s flesh  was described as “blacker, harder, and tougher than that of a goose, having grosser Fires hard of Digestion, of a bad melancholic Juice. . .” (Peter Scott, The Swans: Boston, 1974).  Apparently tastier are tender young cygnets, fattened on malt and barley; they are still consumed, seasoned with nutmeg and shallots and moistened with port wine sauce, at an annual feast by the Dyers and Vintners.
***
Shape-shifters often have no other purpose than to play tricks.  McLeish distinguishes between those shape-shifters who were primarily creation gods, or creative energy incarnate, who once having created something granted it a stable form, and tricksters, who continued to change forms, sometimes to help human beings but often for for the hell of it.  Eventually, tricksters were associated with devils and monsters, or with the more innocuous sprites and goblins.
One such malevolent trickster is Shen Nong, one of three sovereigns of Chinese legend.  Sometimes he manifested himself as a human being with the head of an ox, but he could transform himself into scorching winds that gave rise to forest fires.  Slavic water-spirits, or Vodyanoi, disguised themselves as floating logs, “green-skinned, weed-slimed, and covered with bumps and warts” (McLeish, 653); at night they prowled the lakes and rivers, dragging humans underwater to serve as their slaves.  In contrast, Shakespeare’s use of such tricksters as Puck or Ariel are markedly benign.
***
If you’re keen about gematria (word-number correspondences) and the mystical bonds of letters with objects and qualities, S will not disappoint: the Hebrew equivalent (samekh) means a prop and has a numerical value of 60; the Greek sigma means psychopomp (he who conducts the souls of the dead into the afterlife), has a numerical value of 200,  and corresponds to the human genitalia.
More lyrical the correspondence between the Runic sigel and the juniper tree and solar wheel, or the Runic stan with the blackthorn tree and sacred stones.   There is no precise equivalent between the S and the signs of the Celtic Ogham alphabet; the closest is the straif associated with the thrush, but rest assured that the Gaelic suil refers to a willow tree and has a numerical value of 15.  So there.   In matters more mundane,  S.,= Sabbath or Saint; Saxon, School, Sea;  an indication to “mark” or “label” (medical); ss (in prescription)= half; ss., =to wit; namely; used in legal documents to verify place of action; abbreviation for shortstop in baseball . . .
And though S stands for sarcoma, sadism, schizophrenia, sarcophagus, satyriasis, savagery, smarmy, sulk, Sobibor, schlemiel, schmuck, streptococcus, and Schutzstaffel  or SS, it also stands for star grass, sex,  sapphire, saxophone, silver, Stradivarius, sauterne, sally lun, satori, shalloon. . .
***
Sustaining the boundaries between self and subject matter–whether characters, images,  places, actions, ideas, or feelings–is what distinguishes the writer from what he writes about.  Unlike Dxui, Shakespeare never became Hamlet or Lear, even in his most intense creative moments, when he “conceived” and  “gave birth” (or form) to them, subsequently entering into their minds and bodies.
As a writer, I might occasionally wish to break out of those boundaries and become one of my characters or even the tree I’m extolling in a poem, but always there’s that crucial distance between us.  Always.  Otherwise I’d be a tree, or psychotic, or perhaps both.
And though  applying Keats’s notion of negative capability is imperative for the writer–i.e. entering into the essence of the Other–never can we be more than an occasional guest, even if the host is wholly a product of our own imagination.  A pity. . .At least much of the time: how lovely it would be to shift my shape so it fits, say, the mind and body of the tango dancer, a character is one of my recent stories; to glide, as she does, with sexy elegance and grace across a polished floor in the arms of some darkly handsome Argentinian.  Or to shift into a lilac in full bloom, a bird-of-paradise, the color blue, the sea itself.  Of course, with my luck, even if I acquired this magical ability, I’d likely find myself transformed into a bag lady, a leper, a landfill, the color brown. . .

Peculiar fact: nearly all of the people who have been important to me in one way or another had either a first or last name beginning with the letter S.  Next most popular: the letter  M. Perhaps it goes back to a pattern set in my father’s family: his mother’s name began with S and his father’s with M.  Each of their six children was given, in alternating sequence, a first name beginning with either S or M.  Coincidence?  A secret code?  I’ll never know.  As for the few exceptions: I discern no particular pattern though I imagine if I probed enough I’d learn that these people, too, were closely related to either an S or an M.  To think those letters have become synonymous with the nasty practice of sadomasochism, of which I’m sure my grandparents had nether conscious nor experiential awareness.
***
That swan sculpted from ice: I’ll never forget the first time I saw such a large, luminous thing. It was the centerpiece of the cake and pastries table at a most elaborate wedding reception.  All night I kept waiting for the swan to melt; even a droplet or two would have satisfied me.  But it remained intact, totally dropless, like a person with a disorder of the sweat glands that prevents him from giving off moisture on even the hottest days.  Now that I think back on it, I wonder if that swan had really been carved from ice or whether it was cleverly disguised glass of some sort.
Swans are often linked with clouds since both were privileged to tow the chariots of the gods.  Especially translucent clouds.  In ancient India, the Apsaras, or holy dancers, sometimes were interchangeable with both clouds and swans.  In one tale, someone noticed fluffy white clouds moving in procession across the sky; he assumed they must be swans gliding over water and created the legend of a cosmic lake whose water were sufficiently pure for the bathing rituals of the holy dance maidens.  One reason for the swans’ whiteness was their preference for feeding on pearls.
The Black Swan, on the other hand, has always been associated with evil.  Luckily, such swans are rare, a fact Juvenal thought noteworthy more than two millennia ago.
***
“The future enters into us, transforms itself in us, long before it happens.”–Rainer  Maria Rilke.
“Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath/And after many a summer dies the swan.”.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
“The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of one thousand miles. . . and
an irremediable metamorphosis separated me from the day before.”—Collette
“Hear the music.  The thunder of  /the wings. Love the wild swan.–Robinson Jeffers

ROPE, POCKETS, THE BIDET
I can still hear the slap of the rope on the sidewalk, the jingles that accompanied our games.  Oh you can’t go to Macy’s any more, more, more/There’s a big fat policeman at the door/door/door… High water, low water, over the bridge. . . And what in the world was Double Dutch?
The jump-rope itself had two shiny handles made of wood, usually a lacquered red; the handles were curved to fit your small hands.  You could play the sissy way–two friends swinging a rope no higher than six or eight inches, your aim to jump across the swinging rope without touching it.  If you should be clumsy enough to do the latter, it was time to be a swinger, not a jumper.  Of course, you kept track of the number of times you had cleared the rope.  Or you could be far more daring, swinging the rope over your head and jumping over it when it hit the ground, never pausing, sometimes inviting another girl to join you as you relentlessly turned the rope over and under. . .again, keeping careful track of the number of times she or you cleared the rope. Why did only girls play jump-rope?  And why is it so hard to do even one or two “jumping jacks” when you’re past the age of, say, eleven?
***
Little pouches sewn onto my grandmother’s apron, they held everything: coins, curls of dust, shiny pieces of paper, thread, needles, perhaps a piece of candy she was holding in reserve for one of us. . .Pockets: especially convenient for stowing handkerchiefs and your own hands when you didn’t know what to do with them.  More often than not, some of the stitches that held them came loose and whatever you put in your pocket slipped out immediately: a skate key, a lipstick you weren’t supposed to be using, a tampon.  Or an equally torn glove might hang in there, one finger caught in the pocket’s hole.  And, much to your chagrin, sometimes they were fake, mere patches some designer thought would look neat on the sides of a skirt.  But the real ones were a godsend, whether made from lace, velveteen, leather, or wool, for they could relieve our hands of sticky burdens, substitute well enough for those balky things called purses–or, back a few decades, pocket books.  Which brings to mind, of course, paperbound books. . .Were they really supposed to fit into a pocket?
***
I saw my first bidet on my first trip to Paris, more than four decades ago.  The man who accompanied me refrained from urinating into the bidet just in time, figuring it was meant for something else.  Which in his case turned out to be a basin for washing his clothes,  emptying a packet of the newly invented beads of cold water soap atop his underwear and socks and letting them soak.  If the chambermaid hadn’t shortly thereafter entered the room and burst out laughing, perhaps I’d never been curious about the purpose of a bidet.  Of course, she did not explain, just kept on laughing.   Rude, to say the least.  And indicative of a narrow mind as well, a mind with no tolerance for versatility–for surely the bidet is one of the most versatile of contraptions, effective for all manner of activities–except that for which it was designed.  In fact, I can’t think of a less effective contraceptive, even if the woman rushes from bed to bidet before her lover has even consummated his passion. for centuries been used to cure diseases of the eyes and to restore memory as well as fight against epileptic seizures.  For further information on my own use of emeralds, please click on the next blue arrow.
Ah, but the French. . .
***
Since the Stone Age, people have twisted fires, hair, and strips of hide into an ur-form of rope, which then served as cordage for fishing nets and the making of traps.   Early in its history, rope’s versatility was recognized: a cave-painting of eastern Spain shows a person using a primitive rope ladder to climb down a cliff’s face in order to collect wild honey.To make rope, the ancient Egyptians used reeds and fiber from date palms, as well as grass, papyrus, flax, and camel-hair.  But the rope was used not for binding together bolts of cloth or sheaves of any sort; rather it served as a means for gangs of slaves to combine their strength so they might move the enormous stones necessary for construction of the pyramids and other great monuments.  The ropes were thick as a wrist; once the stone was set on a sledge
with rollers, men, often nearly 200 at a time, could haul it by pulling on four or more long and many-stranded ropes.  The Egyptians also used rope for rigging their boats, creating it from strips of leather as well as palm and papyrus fires.  Several tomb paintings reveal the complicated process of making such rope, one person feeding the fires into a “whirling tool,” which another person turned by hand, at the same time walking backwards until the strands were sufficiently stretched.
***

Who can forget the sinking feeling when a plane on which one was a passenger hit an air pocket and began suddenly to descend, usually on a summer day?  The term pocket is also used in reference to a cavity in the earth that contains gold or some other metallic ore.  When speaking of billiards, a pocket refers to any of the pouches at the sides or corners of the table.

Rodents also have pockets; in fact, there is a species of rodent called the pocket mouse (Perognathus), burrowing creatures common to deserts whose pockets consist of fur-filled pouches in their cheeks.  Larger versions go by the name of pocket gophers. . . Neither they nor the smaller pocket mice have any connection whatsoever with the American legislative phenomenon of the pocket veto: one brought about by the President’s failure to sign a bill presented to him within ten days of the adjournment of Congress:
Presumably he simply stuck the bill in a pocket of his pants and forgot all about it; by the time the laundress discovered the errant piece of paper, it was too late to remedy the situation.

***
Ah, but the French. . .Only they could create such a website as “The (virtual) Baguette.”
Assuming we know that the word bidet means pony, the authors proceed to inform us that the history of the bidet goes back to the time of the Crusades, when returning cavaliers invented a pre-bidet called  Bidoaille, which they could mount as if it were a horse –or a woman.  While sitting astride their creation, they would sing a famous folksong which begins  A dada sur mon bidet. . . Alas, no further lyrics are provided.
By the time of the Industrial Revolution, the bidet had become a status symbol for the nouvelle bourgeoisie. In order to distinguish themselves from the latter, aristocrats designed a new version of the bidet, le Bidache, used exclusively for washing mustaches.  On one of his many trips to Paris,  none other than Karl Marx was so intrigued by this latest device that he used it to wash his ample beard, subsequently proclaiming–to the chagrin of the few remaining aristocrats–”Le lavabo est le Bidache du peuple”( which I loosely translate as “the sink is the bidet of the common man.”
In contemporary Paris, people now display the bidet in their foyers and use it openly, though one must be sufficiently discreet never to talk about its many functions, which include washing one’s feet and le cul (backside), but apparently not efforts to avoid conception. Vive le France!  Accompanying the deadpan text are scenes from that tourist must, Le Galerie de Bidets. . .which turns out to contain several pictures of one and only one ordinary bidet photographed from different angles. As Gertrude Stein never said, a bidet is a bidet is a bidet.  And as Freud never said, sometimes a bidet is simply a bidet, like the cigar that is simply a cigar and not a symbolic penis.
***
To a cowboy, the word rope indicates a lasso or lariat; to a scientist a sticky glutinous formation of stringy matter that develops in a liquid.  If garlic bulbs are strung by twisting or braiding they constitute a “rope of garlic”; likewise there are onion ropes and, conceivably, pomegranate ropes, even starfruit and lichee ropes.
Metaphorically, we speak of “learning the ropes” in reference to learning a particular procedure; perhaps the term derived from the complications of boat-rigging or creating nautical knots. Then there are the ropey metaphors for enclosures, all cliches by now: police “rope off” the scene of a crime or accident (though nowadays they usually accomplish this by setting up flashing lights or those red plastic cones that resemble clown’s hats); an angry person might complain of being “roped”–i.e. tricked–into buying something by a deceptive salesperson, say, a Lambroghini or Jaguar when one already has one or both.
Those who have reached the limits of their endurance are said to be “at the end of their rope.” Perhaps that expression relates to mountain climbing or to execution by hanging; in either case, lack of a sufficient length of rope can lead to disaster.  More obvious the phrase “on the ropes” to indicate the verge of defeat or collapse, a term derived from the roped-off boxing ring.
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Somewhat less familiar pockets include pocket boroughs, a pre-Reformation English term for a borough whose representatives to Parliament were not freely elected but determined by families with clout and cash.  In racing circles, the word pocket refers to a position in which someone’s progress is impeded because other competitors have hemmed him in.  We say something “has lined his pockets” when he has profitted at the expense of others; if something is “in one’s pocket,” she’s won something valuable, like the votes of a particular district or unquestioned obedience of its inhabitants.
Have you ever fished in the pockets of a coat hanging in a closet while waiting, say, for a prospective employer to emerge from his or her office to interview you?  Better yet, the pockets of a visiting dignitary, your lawyer, the man or woman suspected of having an adulterous relationship with your spouse, your stockbroker, your psychotherapist. . .Alas, most of the time, all you’ll find is a crumpled kleenex, a penny or two, some lint.  But there’s always that chance of finding a secret document or a neatly rolled marijuana joint, even keys or money.
***
Simply by dialing an 800 number you can order an IntiMist Bidet and enhance “your own personal hygiene regimen.”  Manufactured by Panasonic, the IntiMist boasts twin nozzles, each for a separate but undefined function, a heated seat, a family nozzle for those who would cleanse together.  What’s more, all functions are user-activated so one need not worry about being sprayed by accident.  You might, however, prefer the Bidecut, which offers “water rinsing for feeling good.”
Too bourgeois? A company called Le Elegant Emporium offers, for a mere few thousand dollars, a bidet created from genuine Italian marble and designed in Japan, the perfect addition to a bathroom so stylish your guests will stay forever.  When I noticed the ad for that bathroom, I began to laugh like that long ago Parisian chambermaid: what could be the use of the genuine marble bidet other than its contribution to snobbery–as if the sunken marble tub the size of a Roman bath, the inevitable jacuzzi, and iridescent commode with gold fixtures were not enough to furnish the wildest imagination of those who dream about water closets.
But without imagination there would be no versatility.  Hence the bidet as an extra place to store wine or, filled with ice, to stock extra cans of beer lest they be needed at a party. . . An extra punch bowl, soup vat, or–with a sterno can artfully concealed beneath– a container for the melted cheese of a fondue, if anyone discriminating enough to purchase a marble bidet would deign to serve his guests something so gauche. . . Has any murderer ever disposed of his victim in the spout of a bidet, preferably finely minced?
***
Versatility, of course, is what links rope, pockets, and bidets. And certainly today the capacity to be versatile is equivalent to the capacity to be unswervingly faithful to the edicts of the gods in simpler times.  How many “riffed” engineering instructors are now teaching the use of computers; how many holders of doctoral degrees in English or the humanities are now teaching the use of computers; how many unemployed scientists. . .
Daily life constantly demands more flexibility, a subcategory of versatility, than ever before. Pity the person who used to pay for a subway or bus ride with a coin or two but must now purchase a computerized “fare card” from a machine that even if functioning is not guaranteed to accept that person’s one and only dollar bill.  Just because. . .
Once upon a time you could seek information over the telephone and be greeted by a human voice.  Whether the speaker knew anything or not is beside the point.  Now one not only must be sufficiently versatile to remember whether to press one or press two, but if you know your party’s extension, well, then press 767 followed by the pound key or would you please enter your date of birth and date of death by pressing the appropriate buttons followed by the star key–or is it the pound key?
***
The word versatile itself derives from the Latin for turn.  Thus a versatile person is able to turn easily from one task to another, one mate to another, one sleeping surface to another, be it a soft bed, a futon, or the floor; likewise one must be able to move from, say, a city on the equator to Alaska with no problem whatsoever despite the radically different patterns of sunrise and sunset.
To achieve such a high degree of versatility, it is necessary to blunt both memory and strong responses to the present, thus diminishing the likelihood of forming close attachments and, god forbid, enacting any rituals.  Potential models include those flowers whose petals have “versatile anthers” so they can swing easily a breeze and people who possess a “versatile toe,” one which can move in several directions at once, adapting to whatever dance pattern might be demanded at the moment. (I often fear such thinking will be much encouraged in the future; indeed, I see evidence of it in many of my present day students, who scorn the need to learn about anything that occurred before they were born and laugh at the very concept of ethical standards and laws that transcend any particular circumstance, at the same time shrugging their shoulders in response to present events.)
A  versicolored object or creature gathers no visual moss and is thus adept at camouflage.  Then there’s the related word “version”–a particular and not necessarily reliable account of an event or story but one that reveals the creative versatility of the person who has created that account.  The word also refers to turning the fetus in the uterus so as to bring it into a position most favorable for birth.
Which brings me to my final point: versatility of thought, essential for all artists, but particularly for writers.  A sure sign of the lack of versatility is literalism, an inability to imagine, let alone write about anything not previously defined and structured.  Literalism is closely linked with authoritarianism, reliance on the knowledge or whims of another person or another historical era; it demands no interpretation, no stretching, as it were, of the fires that comprise the ropework of the mind.
Unlike a pocket, which can contain virtually any combination of things, those who are not versatile can only hold a single idea, most likely a memorized slogan.  And quite unlike a bidet, the non-versatile are capable of only one function: repetition of what has already been said and done.
For such people, to engage in variations that might result in new connections is downright scary.  Yet there can be no progress without risking new webs of possibilities combined with chance, no matter how absurd they might at first seem.  Likewise, no matter how absurd they might ultimately turn out to be. . .
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LABYRINTHS,  MAZES, THE WOMB,  HOME PLATE
One of my favorite childhood books was called The Picture Almanac,
illustrated by my uncle Samuel Nisenson, a popular graphic artist, and published around 1943 by Grosset and Dunlop.  Particularly I liked to work my way through the book’s many mazes, usually with pencil, sometimes, when feeling particularly brazen, with a bright red crayon.
These were pictures of mazes, not labyrinths—though the distinction between the two is not always clear.  Mazes, whose name derives from Old English  masian, to confound, come in a variety of formats, are usually defined as multicursal, fraught with blind alleys and false leads that force one to double or even triple back before finally reaching the center; labyrinths are unicursal, consisting of a single clearly discerned series of paths without junctions, paths that lead directly to the center.  Thus the purpose of entering a maze is eventually to exit while the purpose of entering a labyrinth to reach the center and stay there, achieving a vision of spiritual or psychological fulfillment.  But often both the forms and purpose of each overlap, as in descriptions of the  legend of the Minotaur.
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Supposedly universal: the wish to return to the womb.  But who, after all, would want to live there though it may indeed be a nice place to visit. . .One supposes even the nine-month fetus finds the confinement intolerable and welcomes his or her expulsion, no matter how traumatic the cramping and contractions pushing him towards birth.
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Stepping up to home plate, a latex rectangle attached to the ground, the batter takes a few practice swings, perhaps a few chomps on the tobacco inside his cheek.  If he hits the ball right (or the pitcher walks him), he will get on base–one or even two or three steps closer to his ultimate goal: arriving back at home plate, making sure to touch it with some part of his body.  Perhaps he will even hit a home run and skip blithely around the bases without worrying about making some foolish error that will possibly prevent him from coming home.  And without relying on the skill and luck of his teammates to bring him home or leave him stranded somewhere on the diamond-shaped simplification of a maze that constitutes the in-field.
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The very day I begin to write this, I retrieve my New York Sunday Times and smack on the front page there’s a long article entitled “Reviving Labyrinths/Paths to Inner Peace.” Above the article is a photo of several people, including an elderly woman with a cane, walking around the looped paths of a grassy labyrinth in Tennessee.  One woman, her back to the camera, sits near the center of the labyrinth; whether experiencing fatigue or enlightenment we do not learn.  All over the country, labyrinths are in,  “attracting both churchgoers and church quitters, practicing Buddhists and dharma drop-outs.” Walking a labyrinth, which can be created from a variety of do-it-yourself kits, can quiet the mind, even render one “transparent” to oneself.  There is no mention of slaying a minotaur or some equivalent monster once one “becomes centered,” though the psychological implications are abundant.
Labyrinths, not mazes, this article insists.  Mazes are for whimsical English gardeners who constantly prune their hedgerows, the most elegant example at Hampton Court.  Yet the article also refers to a unicursal three-acre “Maize-Maze” made for the sole purpose of meditation by a farmer in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania: a reminder that the two definitions can overlap.
So be it.  Myself, I prefer having the choice of a multiplicity of routes, whatever one might call the structure, even if the price of such a choice is the potential for leading even the wary to dead ends of missed exits.  Probably because I prefer to enhance the chances for serendipitous discoveries as much as possible. . .(Note: One summer,  along with my family, I actually visited a “Maize Maze” in New York’s Hudson Valley.  Luckily, my then five year old grandson was skilled enough to lead us out, or I’d still be wandering somewhere amidst the dead corn sheaves).
But what arrangement of choices?  Orthogonal, that is, a rectangular grid much like the ones my uncle drew?  Or now that I am more sophisticated, would I prefer a Delta tessellation (interlocking triangles), Sigma (interlocking hexagons with up to six possible paths), Theta (concentric circles starting at the center), or even an atypical maze composed of diamonds combined with octagons and random angles, one that exists in such non-Euclidean spaces as the surface of a Moebius strip?
Already I’m feeling dizzy.  And to think that the primary goal is to exit and thus arrive home.  Oh, for the Druidic forest labyrinths, created simply by winding ropes around trees.
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Though one does not enter it through an act of conscious will but rather as that microscopic globule of matter, the united sperm and egg, the primary purpose of the uterus is to give the fetus a place where it may develop undisturbed to the point that it is ready to exit and, in a sense, arrive “home”  in the world of more or less compatible living creatures.  Combining characteristics of the maze and labyrinth as usually defined, the uterus  is simultaneously both a temporary home with its own center and a space with a single spiraling path that eventually leads home. One might say the same of nests and other uterus analogues such as caves.
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Is the purpose of traveling far from home the ultimate return to that home? Hopefully somewhat transformed?  So many would say–and skip the transformation, too, while you’re at it. For the travel-adverse, there’s nothing like a rough torn bedsheet that smells from spilled milk and semen to make one crave and–at least briefly–appreciate the smoothness of one’s own percale or even polyester sheet, one’s own smells.  Even for the many who travel for the love of it, stepping on that plane can be as foolish in its way as the batter swinging his club so he may get on base and return quickly as possible to the exact spot he now occupies though his “journey” has a high potential for error.
So with the traveler, who risks exposures to injury unlikely at home, like contracting turista at the very least, dengue fever, malaria or schistosomiasis; who by the very act of leaving home risks shipwreck, plane crash, violent weather–like a tsunami– that would never occur at his landlocked home, risks being caught in the crossfire of violent revolutions or even taken  hostage, risks getting spiked on the base path,  committing some foolish Merckel-like error like forgetting to step on a base, twisting an ankle while sliding, or being stranded because of the inept play of his teammates.
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Baskets, large storage jars or jugs, almost any containers, especially if somewhat round, have long been thought analogous with the womb–though the unpregnant womb is actually pear-shaped.  Likewise the nest suggests many womblike places of refuge, beginning with the ancient caves used for shelter in diverse parts of the world. (Caves are linked with labyrinths as well, the symbol of the labrys or double axe having been widely associated with the cave Goddess Rhea of Crete.)
Nests not only serve as refuges for the incubating eggs or newly hatched birds but their construction can involve the same patterns of coiling and twisting germane to the labyrinth; further, they are often associated with secrecy, particularly through concealment of the nest itself by dense foliage or an outer fabric. A thrush might fit a lattice of twigs into a secure crook of a tree or a  hummingbird might hide its minute cup shaped nest behind a spider web, the cup serving as an added refuge as well as an incubator. Sometimes crows line the cups with wool or soft hair plucked from grazing cows or horses.  Then there are the most womblike of all–the domed or enclosed nests, like that of the magpie, woven from thorny sticks, lined with mud and fine roots, concealed under an interlaced twig canopy within which the nest’s dual purpose entrance-exit is itself concealed. A few birds attach a long entrance tube below a slung nest. And the most labyrinthian: the Latin American Anumbi and related “castle builders” include tunnels,  a spiral passage-way leading from the top entrance, and a series of chambers.
More than once I have fantasized about building a large strongly woven nest for myself, perhaps attaching it to a skyscraper’s ledge, then curling up inside to watch what is past, passing, and to come.  Would my position, then, be equivalent to being at the center of a labyrinth?  What exactly is that center, particularly its internalized version?
Home for ancient people all over the world was often a round structure, sometimes so small there was only room to sleep entangled on mat or mud and briefly escape the elements.
Caves, of course, are ubiquitous.  But there have also been leaf huts, stone huts, wooden huts, and, of course, the igloos built from rounded blocks of snow.  Huts made from mammoth bones and the heads of skeletons were constructed in what is now the Ukraine nearly 18,000 years ago; they, too, had a rounded or spherical shape.  Likewise the wooden huts of ancient China and the Mongol huts, known as yurts, build from sheets of thick felt wrapped around curved wooden poles. Imitating bee-hives, Zulus made huts from saplings, grass rope, and woven grass mats.
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Keeping in mind domed cathedrals and such modern attempts at round buildings as the Biosphere in Arizona, to say nothing of domed sports stadiums, one wonders why anyone bothered to experiment with box-shaped homes, substituting the sharp angles of the rectangle for the soothing curves of the womblike hut and its more sophisticated development, the dome. Especially since  domes are intrinsically strong, resource and energy-efficient because they contain the most volume with the least surface, and demand no columns.  Some of the geodesic domes inspired by Buckminster Fuller even have labyrinthian frameworks–though not intended for walking.
At least the baseball field modifies the rectangle by turning it so it’s a diamond within the more or less rounded contours of the outfield. And there are some silo-like skyscrapers, more cylindrical than rectangular, mostly notably in Chicago and Hong Kong.  I have even seen some clustered “silos,” as if the architects were aiming for a unisex building or complex.
Whether speaking of labyrinths or mazes, even in their grid-like rather than spiral versions, nearly everyone thinks of them as feminine–a place to be entered, no matter how many paths or what the ultimate goal.
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The earliest written account of a labyrinth appears in Herodotus, ca. 450 B.C., wherein he describes the enormous multi-chambered Egyptian palace of Amenemhe III, erected around 2300 B.C. and used primarily for the burial of kings.  One decidedly non-mystical purpose for this and similar structures of the time was to foil the efforts of grave robbers.  When Pliny mentions the renowned Knossos,  he conjectures that the inspiration for Daedalus’s design was probably the fabled temple of Amenemhe, its actual location yet to be discovered.   Unfortunately, the overly exuberant Sir Arthur Evans, who began to excavate Knossos in 1900, decided to recreate what he imagined the site must have looked like in its hey-day—hence the glossy red Disney-like scene that greets tourists to Crete: an island that fortunately has other, less publicized labyrinths like that at Phaestos.  Many small coins embossed with labyrinthian designs have been excavated in Crete.
We need only  leap a couple of centuries to Jorge Luis Borges, whose stories and essays are replete with forking paths, corridors leading nowhere, inter-reflecting mirrors, and “vertiginous symmetries” characteristic of the labyrinth, replete both in style and substance.  Whatever shifting set of symbols Borges might associate with the labyrinth at different times, it is both tangible and dreamlike, real and illusory, often linked more with time than space.  As the narrator of “The Garden of Forking Paths” comments, “Beneath English trees I meditated on that lost maze: I imagined it inviolate and perfect. . . ; I imagined it erased by rice fields or beneath the water; I imagined it infinite, no longer composed of octagonal kiosks and returning paths, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms. . .I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.”
Later he mentions an “ivory labyrinth. . . .a minimum labyrinth,” composed of syllables, words, symbols, synonymous with books, a complete philosophical system, a “network of times”—infinite, both divergent and convergent, woven to parallel universes usually unaware of one another, a network that “embraces all possibilities of time.”  Incidentally, Borges, too, interchanges the words maze and labyrinth. . .Is the linguistic ambiguity part of the mystery?
I see I have diverged considerably from those nice ladies and men pictured on in the New York Times as they walk for relaxation and perhaps a self-defined epiphany around those paths in Tennessee.  But in Borgesian terms, there can be no such thing as divergence, only incomplete or unperceived or potential convergence.  So walk, ladies, walk; keep walking in spirals towards that center.  Even though the paths may consist of astro-turf or canvas and in the center there will be no sacred ash tree or demi-beast.  Walk.  Walk.
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How to cope with the unknowable world of the future, what the 1939 New York World’s Fair called The World of Tomorrow–a world whose contours are never guaranteed to match even its most precisely shaped predictions?  Speculative fantasy, particularly of matters technological, offers one approach though the margins between fantasy and reality get more blurred each day.  So let’s bring back a popular object from the past and pretend it expresses the spirit of the future–say, the Volkswagen “Bug.”  Give it a slick new coat of paint and a license plate that says 2001 or 2010. . .  Almost any familiar object, song, or idea will do, as long as it has some favorable associations.  No bringing back the guillotine, the pink rubber enema bag, the geocentric theory of the universe, the myth of Aryan supremacy. . .
Someday there will be nostalgia (from Greek  nostos or return home) for whatever particular moment you find yourself reading these words.  Even if at the same moment particularly brutal wars are taking place in at least four continents; the air is nearly unbreathable; a half dozen new viruses have resulted in global epidemics never experienced before, etc. Of course, nostalgia has a long history, no matter how disguised–else whereforth cometh those old chestnuts of a Golden Age, Lost Atlantis, Lost Paradise, Lost Youth, things-were-so-much-better-when and, best of all,  nostalgia-isn’t-what-it-used-to-be, attributed to everyone from Plato to Groucho Marx?  (Let me add here, however, a comment from my 40something son, who claims that
for his generation the sense of loss will never be so keen as it was for earlier generations because at least in terms of material objects, such as audio and videotapes, the past can be rendered “present” with a mere click or push of a button.  Of course, I insisted in return, the easy availability of the objective past can have little or no correlation with subjective response.)
The root of all nostalgia is the ancient wish to stop time or at least suspend its passage.  So of all major sports, only a baseball game can theoretically go on forever.  And forever–unless marred by inclement weather–can only end when one player of one of the tied teams touches home plate to break the tie. In other words, can only end safe at home.  The nest, the symbolic womb.  The center of the labyrinth?  Or the exit therefrom?  Both?
And someday not too far off someone will perfect the artificial womb.  A sleek round–oh, it must be round–mechanical device that doesn’t ever bleed or shed its artificial endometrial lining, woven from soft wool like the inside of some birds’ cup shaped nests; a womb that’s never tipped, prolapsed, cluttered with fibroids or scarred tissue from a botched abortion; that maintains a constant temperature, rocks like a cradle, never leaks its fluids, always expands in harmony with the needs of the expanding fetus.
I don’t for a moment deny the value of such a machine for the infertile.  But I do feel sorry for those mothers of the future who will never feel the fetus’s acrobatic leaps in her amniotic fluid, will never experience the surprise of a brief kick from a tiny unborn foot.
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The word center derives from the Greek word for needle or spur (kentron); it is the point within a circle equally distant from all points of the circumference; the pivot or axis around which everything rotates; the source or focus.  Like the home, it is both the point of origin and the point of departure: everything emerges from it, revolves around it, and eventually returns to it.  The dual movements,  centrifugal and centripetal, are analogous with the dual actions of respiration, breathing in and breathing out. Traditionally, the center was always a fixed point.
One version of the labyrinth myth, J.C. Cooper notes, implies “a paradoxical answer to a hopeless question. . .Once you have made the difficult and complicated journey, what is at its center?–You are.” (An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols, Thames and Hudson, 1978.)
Though Cooper derives this interpretation from a 15th century Florentine drawing, the notion fits well with contemporary theories of relativism, skepticism, and subsequent focus on the inner self as the sole reliable constant.  Only as nostalgic figures in some fantasized carpet or tapestry can we speak any more about such symbols as a central pillar, central or cosmic tree, central or cosmic mountain, spring, fire, altar, or jewel which unifies heaven and earth.
So reaching the center is not arriving at a previously constructed, presumably permanent home on a named street–an elm tree in front, a green door with a brass knocker, a lamp shining through a curtain–but a pitching of one’s tent at a place previously unknown.  Once a person has arrived, even the spiraling paths are no longer important. . .they were just the means for getting there and could just as well disappear.
The movement of the fetus from the womb is centrifugal.  Until such time as he or she becomes old enough to walk the labyrinth and the movement becomes centripetal, keeping in mind that once reached, the center itself is not so much a place as a point within the self: a point only partially fixed by a combination of DNA and experience in one or more of the brain’s networks of fibers, a point whose circumference can shift at any time, a point from which a space might reach out to assume a conical rather than circular shape, perhaps even a hexagonal or orthorhombic shape.
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Once from the window of an airplane as it was descending towards a small midwestern airport, I noticed a grassy semblance of a baseball diamond, its bases appearing to be white sacks or pillows, its pitching mound the most suggestive I had ever seen of a mons veneris whose gentle slope was covered by a light growth of something green.  I could just make out the figure of a boy –or perhaps it was a girl?–running along the crooked and winding base paths.  He was approaching second base when the plane veered and I could no longer see the field–not center field but second base?  Doubtful.  Nor is it likely he was anticipating a tree, a jewel, a sacred mountain.
Just as long ago when I pushed my red crayon through the mazes my uncle  had created in my Picture Almanac,  I thought nothing about entrances and exits, nothing about the possibility that my uncle would someday die, likewise most of the other people I took for granted.  I and I alone the center of the maze?  Absurd.
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As likely as my ever being old enough to cross the busy street in front of my house all by myself.  Even as a grown-up, the idea is scary, for are we not conditioned to think of ourselves in relationship to other beings, other objects?  So the fantasy of returning to the womb might involve the desire to be at the center of someone else–anything rather than being isolated within the circumference of one’s own life.
Unless we think of that central point as a magnet, capable of drawing into us forces, waves, and particles from the world outside our skin.  Capable as well of selecting what is worth drawing in.  Then the prospect doesn’t seem nearly so lonely.  And perhaps what is outside will also be sufficiently attracted, as it were, to draw the best from us.
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ICICLES,  MEDUSA,  AND THE HISTORY OF CHEESE

Centuries of rain combined with carbon dioxide created the distinctive grooves, flutings, and fissures in the enormous limestone cliffs of Ha Long Bay, north of Hanoi, and similar karst formations in China and Eastern Europe.  Presumably it took only the briefest glance of Medusa’s eyes to sculpt men into stone.  Yet if the world should indeed end in fire, both the karst cliffs and the stones that once were men would quickly melt like the watches in Dali’s best known painting.
Because his saddlebag was made from a cow’s stomach- lining rich with an enzyme called rennin, the milk it contained separated into curds and whey while a  nomad rode his horse across the desert on a hot summer day.  Thus he became the first person to eat cheese; given his great thirst and hunger, he consumed, presumably with alacrity, both the liquid whey and the lumpy white curds. He probably did not realize how the triangulation of heat, rennin, and the motions of his horse helped create his accidental cheese, but the ancient Sumerians knew the secrets of cheese- making 4000 years before Christ; the Greeks also knew; likewise the Hebrews of Biblical times. By the Roman Empire, transformation of a liquid (cow’s milk, sheep’s and goat’s milk, camel’s milk, even the milk of buffaloes, deer, and asses) to the variety of solid substances known as cheese had reached a high level of culinary and aesthetic sophistication.
Icicles, too, often achieve aesthetically pleasing shapes and can be strikingly luminous. Some resemble crystalline beards; others suggest long gnarled fingers or simple cones.  In his poem “Icicles,” Mark Irwin compares the cones with carrots and–through the voice of his young son– a pinocchio nose. The sound they make after breaking up and falling to a wind-swept street reminds him of delicate piano music.  But no matter how brilliantly designed,  icicles are doomed to give up their solidity, sooner or later to melt, thaw, resolve itself into a dew. The original “melting watches,” they demand no Salvador Dali to remind us of time’s mutability.
In the polar regions, of course, they can sustain themselves for months or even years; I wonder if there are any icicles in Antarctica whose life span equals that of trees.  Ordinary trees, like elms and maples, not necessarily ancient sequoia: an icicle as old as the elm outside my window would be startling enough.
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Medusa aside, not all petrifaction is a dead end.  Deucalion, the son of Prometheus, along with his wife Pyrrha, cast stones from which there sprang men and women to repopulate the world after a disastrous flood.  First they had to interpret an oracle’s command that they cast behind them the bones of their mother: a thinly disguised metaphor for the stones of the earth.
And because they were lucky enough to be embedded in one of the earth’s most “receptive” types of stone, known as sedimentary rock, some shells and bones of the distant past reveal to us precise reproductions of their inner and outer structures.  The process of petrifaction, sometimes by interaction with minerals from underground water, has preserved for us ancient plant and animal remains.  Most dramatically, wood has been transformed into stone molecule by molecule, its original form sustained in those striking rockscapes called petrified forests.
Without petrifaction there would be no dinosaur prints, no footprints of ancient people such as those recently discovered in the south of Africa near the once sandy shore of a lagoon. Studies have even been made of petrified shit, technically known as Coprolites; if the source can be determined the fossilized excrement can offer important clues about the feeding habits of various animals. Mithra, a Persian god whose cult gave rise to Mithraism, a once widespread religion stressing the dualistic struggle between good and evil, was allegedly born from a stone womb–which may or may not be a thinly disguised metaphor for the bones of the earth. And while the expression “blood from a stone” refers ironically to a cold, unfeeling person, in Vietnamese folklore, stones not only bleed but can feel pain if pricked by a pick.  Certainly the Stone Age shapers of tools from stone must have had red hands for more reasons than one. To make hard cheese one must “cheddar” the curds, whey, salt flakes, and seasonings so the can be cut into pieces, then stacked and turned at the bottom of the cheese vat.  Bacteria that produce lactic-acid are essential for making hard cheese.  Usually such cheeses are deep harvest-moon- yellow, such as Cheshire, Darby, or Vermont Cheddar.  Extra-hard cheese is most suitable for grating and must be matured for at least three years.  The early Romans made and exported such and to this day the best are either Italian or Swiss: Parmesan, Sbrinz, Sapsago.    Many people, myself included, are fond of cheeses like Brie and Camembert, which have a soft center concealed beneath a firm rind which has been treated with spores of white mold or Penicillium.  One might compare them with Sabras, or native-born Israelis, reputed to be tough on the outside but soft within.

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Tinged with blue and violet because, like water, ice absorbs red wavelengths more readily than blue, mountain glaciers are tongues of moving ice thrust from fields of compacted snow mixed with ice granules; they fill the clefts and valleys created at one time by streams, their movement sometimes causing large cracks or crevasses in their upper surface.  Though they move as solids, melting occurs at varying rates around their edges.  Like the rain that carves limestone into karst formations, glaciers can carve valleys into frozen amphitheaters and transform them so tributary valleys are left hanging high above what were once the floors of now eroded slopes.
Though not as dynamic as glaciers, the layers of ice that create a lid on wintering lakes and ponds have a beauty of their own.  Sometimes they’re a lustrous blue, large but
temporal gems.  Often I find them suggestive of wide open exceptionally blue eyes, blue as the eyes of dolls, as the eyes of my mother even as she lay dying.
The bodies of wooly mammoths and a rhinoceros, skin and flesh intact, have been found preserved under thick layers of Siberian ice or permafrost.  The deeper the layer, the deeper the color of the ice, even if nothing lies within except multiple lattices of ice, composed of mathematically precise honeycombs of crystalline hexagons, each hexagon unique.  The topography is not static, however.  Ice crystals grow by adding clusters of atoms to the outer surface of a lattice; eventually ripples develop, capable of changing the basic format.
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Objects of durability, even permanence;  antitheses of decay, decomposition, mutability–if one ignores the constant threats of erosion–  stones have long symbolized the fantasy of immortal life. Even though they are usually perceived as dead matter. . .He’s stone cold dead in the market. Stone-blind; stone-deaf; stone-broke; stoned.  Unless referring to a volcanic eruption, few think of stone as a former liquid back when the raw matter of earth was going through enormous disruptions and transformations, particles congealing to rock,  rocks flowing like rivers.  Fewer still think of stones as having an inner life–until they discover the wonders of geodes, whose stony outer “rinds” conceal brilliant crystals that developed when gas bubbles trapped inside molten basalt eventually cooled.  Quartz crystals, the color of ice, may line the opened cavity of a geode.  Sometimes the quartz crystals are black or the flaming red of a rhodochrosite, perhaps interlaced with bluish white spirals.
The manufacturers of Limoges china take pride in the translucence of their best cups and bowls, referring in an ad to their “lithophany”: literally, stone that shines from within.
Given the intense labor necessary to produce them, I know I should be more appreciative of blue cheeses.  Inoculated with a particular penicillium spore that creates their blue or
green veins as well as the characteristic aroma, these cheeses are molded internally and thus ripen slowly from inside out, the opposite of “surface ripened” cheeses like Camembert. Think of people who only gradually reveal their highly valued inner selves and may ignore or even scorn those who stress superficial beauty.
But why the old canard that the (pre-space age) invisible side of the moon consists of green cheese?  Why not Brick or Limburger whose red bacteria bloom on the surface? Feta cheese, in homage to the ancient Greek astronomers?  Certainly there are more alluring rinds both real and imagined than a mere tinge of green.   Why not a brandy-washed rind, a waxy vermillion Gouda rind,  or better yet, the soft cotton bandage wrapped around traditional Cheddar? Given the stonelike characteristics of the moon, why not the toughly fissured rinds favored by the Swiss, rinds that resemble karst or the outermost surface of a geode .
In cirrus clouds, ice crystals create an internal architecture of plates or columns, sometimes glazed with rime. Sea ice, visible in the Arctic, and sudden “explosions” of icy crags the Eskimos call “leaping ice” have markedly different anatomical features but both can be extremely dangerous.
I guess I first realized that ice has an inner life back when for lack of anything else to do, I studied a block of ice in my grandmother’s wooden “ice box,” precursor of the refrigerator. And discovered thin blue threads inside the ice, blue threads that I began to imagine were secret rivers–until my revery was shattered with a command that I quickly shut the door of the ice box or the newly delivered block would melt, flooding myself and the floor and spoiling all that good food as well… So I shifted to studying ice cubes.  No blue rivers, but certainly plenty of bubbles and internal crackles, an “island” of more concentrated, whiter particles in the center; as the cube began to melt a number of pores and twig-like scratches appeared inside my miniature iceberg.
A European friend once told me that hearing the clink of ice cubes in a glass of water was his first memory of visiting America.

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Once when walking in the cove of an island in Casco Bay,  I noticed a fairly large green rock–not exactly emerald-green, but green nonetheless.  And it was not covered with lichens or any other algae. I would get a bucket or some other container, come back to retrieve my treasure.  No, this is not a carpe diem lesson:  I retrieved the rock in plenty of time and it had neither slipped back to sea nor lost its color. Even after I transported it over 500 miles to my home outside Washington, D.C., the rock retained its greenness. At least I kept convincing myself it did though I realized it was slowly becoming an ordinary Maine-gray.
To this day I swear it still retains a memory-trace of its original green, perhaps more the light green of a freshly cut lime than an emerald.  But unlike the fabled Black Stone of Cybele, it bore no secret message, no oracle.  Nor did it possess the magical ability to be reborn into bread, as in the Gospel of Mark, or to ward off demons, like the “thunder stones” that fell from heaven as gifts from the sky gods and the “rain stones” worshipped by ancient Mexicans because they could ward off fevers as well as control the weather.  Yet someday I plan to test whether it might not be an ancient bethel (Hebrew for House of God) like the stone upon which Jacob fell asleep prior to his dream of the ladder.  Perhaps I will dream then about rungs of quartz, their crystals blazing with color.

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Perhaps, too, those crystals will be transparent as the pane of ice the narrator of Robert Frost’s “After Apple Picking” skims from the top of a winter pail.  Looking through the
pane, he enters a dream replete with falling apples, load upon load, a dream that convinces him that he’s “done with apple picking now” and thus sets the stage for a major psychological transformation.
Ice, a transformation of water, itself is transformed into an instrument through which one might see the future. At the same time it is the “window” through which memory  (in Frost’s case, of the time spent picking apples) enters the space of the future, the past affecting and interacting with what is to come.
So when my green stone becomes a dream pillow, there’s a chance I will re-experience that  day in Maine when I first discovered my stone.  At least for the duration of the dream.
In a particularly witty episode of  Mr. Palomar, Italo Calvino writes about The Cheese Museum, wherein cheeses of all shapes, textures, and flavors are “catalogued” and preserved, a place the narrator likens first to an encyclopedia, then to a museum: “Behind every cheese there is a pasture of a different green under a different sky: meadows caked with salt that the tides of Normandy deposit every evening; meadows scented with aromas in the windy sunlight of Provence; there are different flocks. . .there are secret processes handed down over the centuries.”
Every cheese contains the civilization that has created it as well as a name which is part of a language embodying “the system of cheeses as a whole” in all its grammatical nuances.  Ultimately the cheeses become the linguistic data for pondering the deepest of philosophical issues, not only nomenclature, but  “concepts of cheeses, meanings of cheeses, histories of cheeses, contexts of cheeses, psychologies of cheeses. . .”
Of course, there’s something quintessentially European about such a notion.  An American writer would more likely imagine a Theme Park of Cheese, with mounds of cottage cheese in which children can roll and jump, long cheddar slides, a cheese castle whose windows are shaped like the gaps in Swiss Cheese, and a Wonder Wheel made entirely from braided string cheese. Naturally there would be perfectly wrapped and hence sanitary panels of processed American cheese, arranged to suggest trucks and trains, a model village.
And of course the grand attraction would be the Largest Cheese in the World, a sphere of solid white cheese at least the size of the Astrodome and weighing thousands of tons.  It would be modeled after the enormous cheese presented to Thomas Jefferson on his birthday by a group of farmers [sic].  What Jefferson did with his cheese, whose makers boasted that it was indeed the largest in the world at that time, no one will ever know.  Perhaps a few mice still nibble at its remains somewhere in a dark corner of Monticello.  But in our American Theme Park of Cheese, visitors would be allowed to purchase a small replica of the Great Cheese as a souvenir.  Though they would not ponder its metaphysical implications, neither would they consume it.  Rather they would display it on a mantle along with the mementos of other expeditions, the miniature replica of Niagara Falls, the field of genuine Kentucky Bluegrass under a plastic dome–which shaken hard enough will pelt the grass with tiny flakes of snow.
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To this day, most Chinese think eating cheese is as barbaric as we may think their eating of snakes and dogs.  Even pizza, though considered stylishly American, is only served in restaurants and hotels catering to westerners.  Indeed, it is a mystery why Asians in general have not included dairy products in their cuisine.  The sacred cow may, as Marvin Harris argues, be more important for its excrement, used for fuel, fertilizer, and building materials in a place like India, than for its milk products, but that does not explain the disdain for cheese and other dairy products in Japan, China, Indonesia, etc.  Yet there is no logical explanation for our own disdain for horse meat, dog meat,  fried snake, the flesh of tamed tigers, tamed lions.
Icebergs and ice floes can be treacherous; likewise ice storms and the blinding sea ice of the Arctic.  Yet ice, too, has been tamed: the skating rink, the ice hockey arena, the slick stage for The One and Only Ice Capades.  Even the most militant opponents of television and organized sports, particularly the hoopla of the modern Olympics, will admit that every four years they admire the skills of figure skaters who can balance on the tip of a skate’s blade, swirl, leap, and pirhouette, most of the time landing straight up on the ice with a flourish and a wave.
We hear all too often about the dangers of stones.  Were the dinosaurs wiped out by gigantic meteorites?  Will the human race suffer the same fate?  Crushing rock slides,  battles and street brawls where people still toss stones at each other,  the hurling of stones through store windows in order to loot or, as on Kristallnacht, deliberately to destroy. . . Yet we bury our dead under stones that will presumably protect them and preserve their memory; in some cultures, it is common to place a few stones on the top of a grave as a token of respect.  Stones have been carved into statues and urns; huge stones have for centuries been arranged in circles for astronomical purposes and, of course, an early form of housing consisted of the stone hut, the foundation of sedentary societies.  To say nothing about the vast sub-category of gem stones; the philosopher’s stone–symbol of regeneration–corner stones, key stones, and foundation stones.
Stones and trees are complementary, stones suggesting the eternal and by extension the celestial, trees the cycles of life and death and by extension the earthly.  Yet they are also similar, the grooved bark of trees analogous with the fissures of karst, and both contain the potential for being shaped into either harmful or beneficent objects.   For every wooden club, there is a violin; for every stone ax or millstone (in the metaphorical sense), a marble statue.

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HOURGLASS, FAT, REVERSALS

To turn things upside down just for the hell of it:  what a delight, especially if you’re a kid. Watching a puddle create itself from the spilled milk of an inverted pitcher or the roll of spilled marbles across a floor is surely worth the inevitable scolding. Even more fun than filling a pail with damp sand, then turning it over so a perfectly cylindrical mound drops onto the beach.   Little did I dream that when helping my mother invert a cake from pan to platter I was participating in the interplay of opposites, an ancient natural and human process in which one quality gives rise to its opposite, death  to life, good to evil, etc., the interplay in this case involving nothing more or less than that between emptiness of one object and fullness of another (or between absence and presence.)
Sticking things together also has its pleasures, whether we congeal them with glue, bits of clay, fat products, gum, saliva;  tie them with string or rope; knot, pin, or sew them together.  Like the time my young friends and I tied a neighborhood boy to a tree with an elaborately twisted rope,  or when at a summer camp, a few of us made a paste from dirt, water and Crisco stolen from the camp kitchen, then proceeded to “seal” together the bed sheets of a girl named Jolene.  I doubt any of us knew a thing about gravitational pull or the chemical bonding of molecules, but if we had, we likely would have tried to mobilize these forces to join Jolene’s bra with the Stars and Stripes atop the camp’s flagpole.  As it turned out, we tried to attach the bra’s hooks after sunset to the thick metal eye intended for the flag’s hook. The connection failed.
Which reminds me of other ill-fated efforts to bind: the use of tight corsets to mold the bodies of Victorian women so even the most plump might resemble an hour glass; the long time Chinese custom of binding the feet of young girls because small, dainty feet supposedly enhanced female attractiveness, particularly in the upper classes; tying up the bodies of prisoners and slaves so as to render them immobile; using chains and sashes to indicate the binding of a military officer to his service.
One day I decided to ride my bicycle in reverse as far as I could just to see what would happen.  I neither collided with any other vehicle nor did I graze any knees or lawns.  But after a while I got dizzy.  That same year–I guess you could say I was going through some sort of regressive transformation– I wore my coat inside out .  It was not one of those reversible jobs, either; in fact, the inwardly turned wool made my skin itch. After about a week, I realized that no one had noticed a thing, so I gave up.  Like all kids, I had accidentally put on any number of nightgowns or dresses inside-out; my mother would always smile and say that meant I was going to have a big surprise.  But nothing ever happened.
Who hasn’t turned back the hands of a clock, maybe briefly succumbing to the illusion that time had indeed been reversed. Even a respected modern astrophysicist named Thomas Gold thought time might run backward when in its death throes the universe went through its final contraction. At the same time, the brain waves of any humans still around would also be reversed, thus reversing their subjective perception of time.  No, they would not watch the universe itself running backwards like a rewound film; they would simply perceive it as expanding rather than contracting. Presumably they will have forgotten all about illusions. Good luck.
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Hourglasses, sloths and bats, orchids blooming upside-down on their stems, the letter X, the Tarot deck’s hanged man.  There is even a species of catfish, the Synodontis nigriventis  from Africa, that swims upside down, which helps it feed on the mosquito larvae floating the water’s surface. And many birds hang their nests upside down from branches.  Of course, there’s the fetus positioned resupinate–or head first–in the womb prior to birth.  Because of small holes pierced in their ankles, Venus of Willendorf amulets are thought to have been worn upside down, possibly to attract other fertility gods.
And the allegedly salubrious yoga posture of standing on one’s head, to say nothing of acrobats’ head stands, the terminal position of the old gray goose in the folksong “Go Tell Aunt Rhody,” who “died in the mill pond standing on its head.”  How different would things be if man had not evolved into a bipedal mammal but instead moved around using his head and arms, feet extended in the air like branches of a tree?  Particularly a two-forked tree that resembles the letter Y.
Life-threatening as nicotine, ugly, and utterly unstylish–at least in modern America and France–fat is verboten  though the women in the great paintings of the Renaissance as well as those in the ancient paintings of China were always fleshy, and even today in some cultures fatness is considered a sign of wealth.
Animal fat is particularly taboo.  Yet without the conjoined molecules of animal fat, or that lovely word tallow, the world would have been a far darker place unto the discovery of electricity.  Lamps fueled by butter and other oils go back many centuries and most candles were fueled by tallow despite its noxious smell. Some American Indians used the tallow from a fatty fish; beeswax, that yellowish substance created by bees and used as “mortar” in their honeycombs, has long been prized for making church candles and in the Middle Ages was accepted payment for tithes.
As a kid growing up during World War II, I have clear memories of neighborhood ladies collecting leftover fat, rendered and stored in jars, for the war effort.  I suppose the fat had something to do with making ammunition?
Of course, without tallow or lard, we would also be a lot dirtier as well, soapless as any other animal.  And without fibers from adipose tissue–i.e. fat, we would have no connective tissue, no plasma membranes around our cells.  Even cholesterol, the pariah of all fats,  helps to keep us connected within, along with collagen and elastin fibers.
Walking backward is allegedly good for one’s sense of balance, as long as the person in front of you doesn’t knock you over.  Likewise the ability to count backward, often by threes or fours, is allegedly a clue to one’s cerebral capacity, at the very least one’s  sobriety. Riding backward on a subway might result in an earlier arrival at the next (future) station than the person riding forward in the one and only direction time’s arrow can ever take.
Sometimes we make or hear glib statements about the reversing of an illness, as if the illness had flipped back upon itself, a snake swallowing its tail.  And how many creams, potions, hormones, pomades, herbal brews, extracts of goat or rabbit testicles, pastes, peels, and products of elimination have at various times been deemed capable of reversing the aging process?
Surely someone will be able to harness the power of geomagnetic reversal, so like a magnetosphere whose charged particles flip its orientation every few millions years making the North Pole into the South Pole and vice-versa,  we could simply reverse the “field lines” of our personal magnetism, transposing the energy of youth with the wisdom of old age as the spirit moved us. If anyone doubted the validity of this act, he would only have to examine the records preserved in magnetic rocks like basalt, the very method used to validate geomagnetic reversal.
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Some roots, like those of the swamp cypress and various ferns, actually reach upward.  But that’s not why the Tree of Life or Great Cosmic Tree is pictured upside-down in a number of mythical and mystical systems, the upwardly thrust roots  (indicating origins) and downward leaning branches symbolizing how the celestial and earthly not only reflect but can influence one another.  Thus, that which is high can be contaminated by earthly transgressions while that which is below can be purified and rise heavenward. The Sephirotic Tree associated with the mystical teachings of the Kabbalah is often inverted; likewise the Islamic Tree of Happiness since the roots of joy come from Heaven.  Certainly what lies below the earth itself and is usually invisible–rocks, bulbs, tubers, worms, moles, buried treasure, archeological remains– can be as fascinating as that which we see above it.
Unfortunately, my own efforts to stand on my head have yet to succeed.  Perhaps that’s because of my fondness for cloudy, even rainy, days and aversion to an overabundance of sunlight.  Or I prefer to express my body’s alphabet not as a Y but as an R, both legs touching the ground even if one might be a bit gimpy.
Our bodies are aswarm with atoms, some covalent, joining with other atoms to make molecules by sharing their outermost particles, and some ionic, like salt, that do not actually share electrons when bonding but create forces that are in turn capable of cohering other atoms.   I think of a man and woman who may not even know each other’s names but conceive a child in the course of a one-night stand. But on second thought, salt will do.
As far as we know, there is no anti-gravitational force strong enough to counter the pull and pressure of gravity.  That’s fine in terms of preventing us from walking through walls but unfortunate in terms of preventing the ultimate collapse of the universe; the absence of such a force, scientists now believe, is also the death knell of all those lovely cyclical theories of time.  So barring the emergence of such, forget returning to earth as a butterfly––or as a human being, if, dear reader, you just happen to be a butterfly. . .
Only a total fool would claim that Egyptian hieroglyphics plus the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets move backwards in the same way some Americans still insist that the British drive on the “wrong side of the street”; left and right have nothing to do with the reversible or irreversible, except possibly that most people are right handed so what is right is, well. . .right rather than left or sinister.  Probably the most politically correct form of writing is the ancient boustrophedon, in which alternate lines run from right to left and vice-versa, in imitation of an ox plowing a field. But nobody uses it anymore. We have to make do with the lowly palindrome, a sentence or word which reads the same backwards or forwards: “Madam, I’m Adam” or “Poor Dan is in a droop.”  A trick of the language gods, amusing, but scarcely capable of satisfying the wish to reverse the inexorable arrow of time.
In fact–and I am not speaking here of dyslexia–there are a number of connoisseurs of reversed language, who claim that if we play an audiotape backwards, we will  hear all manner of words contrary to what a person seems actually to be saying.  An Australian researcher, David John Oates, notes that if played backwards, the tape of a l998 Clinton news conference, during which he was accused of dishonesty,  says “Denied the habits and I said damn ya.” Oates also studies reversed music, like the famous and hotly disputed “Paul is Dead” refrain.
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The two interlaced triangles of Solomon’s Seal, or the Star of David, are a familiar example of inversion. One of its alternate names, Magen David, was linked with a family of vintners long before today’s bottled versions of sweet red wine, kosher for Passover.  Some speculate that the double triangulation was a guideline for grouping several stars into a hexagonal constellation, including Orion, Sirius, and Vega.  As such, it might have been the secret symbol of a stargazing priestly cult long before Kings David and Solomon.
But the Six-Pointed Star is by no means strictly kosher.  The Theosophical Society defines it as the seal of the Hindu god Vishnu, its bipolar nature suggesting the link between spirit and matter, male and female, etc.  Inspired by the personal seal of H.P. Blavatsky, the society’s seal incorporates the star into a circle, along with a small Sanskrit version of the swastika and the Egyptian ankh.  Studies of tribal art reveal that a number of cultures decorate their pottery with stylized human figures both upright and inverted; since these cultures are widely separated in time and place, there is no question of imitation, much less a distorted adaptation like the Nazi appropriation of the swastika (in reverse, I might add.)
How come our universe, as well as other galaxies, doesn’t fly apart? Though unproven, one of the most provocative explanations involves a special form of gravity called “dark matter.” Possibly it consists of neutrinos, possibly of an invisible cosmic glue, possibly of some dark stuff of which dreams are made. . .
Knots, too, can bind in both a positive and negative sense. Sometimes they are thought to have magical properties:  fishermen in the Shetland Islands still try to control the winds by tying special knots.  Buddhism  includes the Endless Knot as one of its sacred emblems, associating it with everlasting life–an infinite tying together of body and spirit, one generation with the next, as well as a means to bind a person to good fortune and at the same time create an obstacle to evil.          Knotted cords can create enclosures–both protective and restraining.  We may be knotted to our Fate but also may be capable of loosening a knot and securing freedom or salvation.  Orthodox Jewish men knot together the fringes of their prayer shawl in complicated ancient patterns rich with semantic implications, the knottier the better.  But there is no evidence of Jewish interest in labyrinths, whose systems of loops and spirals are sometimes equated with a knot that must be untied. A possible explanation is that the Hebrew god is revealed a priori rather than discovered as an object of a quest.
With one strike of his sword, Alexander cut the Gordian knot, which a peasant had intricately wound from bark, and thus fulfilled the oracle that he who undid the knot would rule Asia.   But those of us not so bold and powerful as Alexander know that sometimes  it can be more difficult to untie a knot than to create one, especially if the knot has been too tightly wound.  Like often it is harder to separate oneself from another person, place, idea, or memory than it is to attach oneself.
Perhaps that is why fairly often I find myself humming or even singing an old song “out of the blue.”  And not necessarily because of its musical merits: often it’s a ditty or jingle, an old singing commercial for, say, Rheingold Beer, that binds itself to some mysterious fibers in my brain. I may be able to cut the loops of its sound waves but most likely they will return at some time when least expected.
Once I had the bizarre experience of watching someone close to me enter the initial phase of what used to be called a “nervous breakdown.” Her primary hallucination was that suddenly everything had started spinning backwards: the clothes in the washing machine; the wheels of passing cars ; the prevailing wind and with it the fronds of the palm trees; the music playing on the radio, even the surf in the nearby Gulf of Mexico.
The person–my mother– had recently retired from her job and moved from New York to Florida, a place she found alien and isolating; to move back to her former home was no longer a possibility, but the reverse movements she imagined served dramatically to express her unfulfillable desire to do so.  Also she might have been expressing a sharpened awareness that she had now reached old age.  But what she saw was, of course, illusory at best–like all attempts to reverse time.

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HEXAGONS, SPIRALS,  CANDLESTICKS
Six a.m.  Rarely am I awake at such an hour though according to the Catholic Church, it’s the prime hour, the first canonical hour.  Unable to rewind the loose strings of a dream, I begin to read E.C. Krupp’s Echoes of the Ancient Skies and learn that the Desana Indians of Colombia, inspired by quartz crystals’ six-sided bounded forms, believe the shape of the sky is hexagonal.
And why not?   Is their choice of a shape for ordering nature any further from the meandering truth than our own likening of the sky to a dome, as if the air below were a mosque or Byzantine church, or perhaps a head to fit under that enormous blue or gray skullcap?  The ancient Chinese believed the earth was square, or, more precisely, a cube enclosed within a heavenly canopy.

The coils of a rope; fingerprint whorls; curved patterns on leaves, shells and various animal horns; the Hebrew lamed and the Roman S; violins, pine cones, whirlpools, braids, and pears:  long before I learned about the Fibonacci Sequence, I was fascinated by spirals, the most prolific of all natural forms. Spiral galaxies; the spiral stone carvings of the Celts and Maori; the cochlea deep inside the ear;  the brain’s limbic system; the double helix; umbilical cord; the Snake River; anything that meanders or invites meandering.   And just what is the Fibonacci Sequence?  It has something to do with numbers–but only indirectly with the number 6. . .

They’re bronze, they’re heavy, they’re old, but I cannot claim unequivocally that the candlesticks I inherited travelled in steerage along with my grandmother when she emigrated from Lithuania around 1900.
Perhaps my grandfather discovered them in some Brooklyn junk shop?  Intrigued by their dragon shape, especially by their large cambered wings carved to resemble feathers and by their coiled tails, he bought them as a gift for my grandmother with the money he was supposed spend on meat and potatoes, perhaps on a new pair of knickers or a shoes for one of his six children?
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How tedious the life of construction bees!  All that shaping of honeycombs; the same pattern of hexagonal wax cells over and over–though Darwin praised the honeycomb’s architecture as “absolutely perfect in economizing labor and wax.”  Just for variety, I’d want to experiment with round or even rhomboid storage tanks for the hive’s pollen and eggs–even if the hexagon evolved precisely because its efficiency was far superior to that of circles or any other shapes. Indeed, Karl von Frisch thinks evolution was not involved at all, that right from the start, bees knew the advantages of cell walls that met at perfect 120 degree angles.  Most spiders, too, with the reticules between their webs’ sticky strings nearly always hexagonal.  And some tortoises, those whose shells are grooved with numerous adjoining hexagons.  The Desana Indians believe each hexagon in nature signifies a character in their creation myth.  Six waterfalls, each containing the intertwined head and tail of a giant anaconda, mark the six corners of the earth. . .Still I’d like to experiment with round or rhomboid storage tanks, perhaps even cruciform–a shape, which like the original swastika, a Hindu good luck symbol–is related to the spiral.

When I rub my finger in the small cups atop the trunk-like protrusion from each bronze dragon’s mouth, I find a nearly black residue of very old wax.  Certainly I do not know when my grandmother last lit the sabbath candles placed in those small cups; and just as certainly I know that I myself have never used the candlesticks for lighting candles of any sort, lest they flop over on their unevenly curved paws.  The top rim of each cup is carved with coils and scrolls.  It is strange to feel the bits of old wax between my fingers, as if I were somehow feeling a bit of flesh my grandmother left behind inadvertently when she died.

A box, a plain old square or rectangular box, offers few associations.  In myth there is only Pandora, the contents of whose box tend to be linked with the most currently stylish social problems of a particular time and place: child abuse, sexual harassment, pollution, incest, eating disorders–you pays your money and. . .An easy way to keep up with the ever shifting identity of those ills contained in Pandora’s box is to scan the Best Seller List, particularly the subject matter of glossy hardbacks with gold-embossed covers.  Ah, but just mention a spiral and even the most restrained person cannot resist making swirling gestures with his hands.
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Meandering back to Fibonacci’s sequence of numbers: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, and so on, each number the sum of the two preceding it, I am delighted to learn that in all of nature the sunflower best exemplifies the pattern implicit in that sequence, which is related to the logarithmic spiral (the only curve that can grow larger without an alteration of shape).    Even more delighted than when I learn that it was Fibonacci, a native of Pisa in the 12th century, who accomplished the  feat of introducing the Arabic numerals to Europe as an efficient alternative to those endless strings of Roman L’s, X’, V’s, etc.    Though the seeds in a sunflower most  accurately conform to Fibonacci’s sequence, pine cone scales, daisy petals, and the patterns of strawberry seeds also qualify, as do the spiraling lobes of cabbages, cauliflower, and roses. Quite a mathematical salad,  better known as The Golden Mean.  No wonder I’ve always loved spirals: they embody my strong desire to wander, even–or especially–to the point of getting lost or returning to the center, as in a curved maze.
Strange how the number 6 has both highly favorable and utterly bestial connotations.  As
for the first, 6 is considered a perfect number, the sum of its factors. But as far back as the Book of Revelation, 666 was a code for the most bestial person of the moment. The Anti-Christ.  Pope Leo….Even  Adolph Hitler.  There was a flurry of talk about the dire implications of 666 when Ronald Wilson Reagan was first elected President though as far as we know the man did not quite live up to the myth.
True, one of the most glorious events in the history of baseball–when little Al Gionfriddo, an obscure centerfielder of the Brooklyn Dodgers, interfered with destiny by leaping into the silvery air of Yankee Stadium and catching a ball off the bat of Joe DiMaggio that until that moment was fated to become a home run– occurred in the 6th inning of the 6th game of the World Series on the 6th day of October.
I’ve already told you about my fondness for braids, how with proper braiding, each spiral of hair is neatly joined with its peers, the ultimate entwining of loose ends creating a sense of unity and closure impossible to achieve otherwise except with the corn row style popular with African Americans, that style itself an elaborate variation of plaiting or braiding. Often I catch myself braiding stray bits of string or wire, better yet braiding the string with the wire, a blade of grass with a shoelace, lines from an old Pepsi-Cola jingle with an aria from Rigoletto.  Though I scarcely know any Yiddish, sometimes I hum one of my grandmother’s old melodies quietly to myself while lecturing to a class on how to write a proper English paragraph or while nodding in mock response to some bore’s account of how he would resolve the latest Middle East crisis if only he. . .

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The more I look at my grandmother’s bronze candlesticks the more I’m convinced they were made in China–back when such an origin implied nothing derogatory about an object’s quality.  Quite the contrary, given the combination of delicacy and strength in traditional Chinese art, the thinly inked contours of enormous mountains,  gently carved spirals and ideograms floating across the bands on top of and along the sides of massive urns.  Orthodox Jews would be upset, of course, that my grandmother, her face covered with a white cloth, chanted the prayer and lit the sabbath candles in bronze candlesticks shaped like dragons rather than the plain cylinders they consider ordained for such occasions.

When T.S. Eliot begins “Preludes” with the lines “Six p.m./ The burnt out ends of smoky days ,” presumably he was referring to a blustery late fall or early winter evening.  The rest of the year 6 p.m. is the hour of ambiguity, neither day nor night but partaking of both.  The hour of traffic jams, the local news and weather, dinner in much of America and northern Europe; in restaurants, the last chance for the Early Bird Special and in hospitals and prisons, the beginning of visiting hours.
The Navajo Indians also worship the hexagon and prefer to build their hogans in that shape.  Which has nothing to do, I assume, with the fact that the number 6 is a composite number (6=2×3). Yet the ancient Babylonians devised the 60 minute hour on the basis of the following sequence: 2×2x3×5, which parallels the sequence Fibonacci discovered many centuries later.
Weary of sitting at my computer, I go outside and pluck an azalea blossom from my neighbor’s bush.  Six petals. Likewise the fading tulips in my other neighbor’s garden. I open my dictionary at random and come across a picture of something called an “overshot wheel,” a water wheel used to fill buckets; it has six spokes. Always the sixth sense is equated with intuition.
What if the brain’s cerebrum had a sixth lobe, in addition to the usual five on each side of the brain?

But what are these lobes composed of but spiraling fibers inside the tightly wound spirals of the cortex?  And so one returns to the spiral, whether speaking of the outermost reaches of human curiosity–the cosmos and its numberless galaxies– or the inmost mysteries of human consciousness.   I dare say all spirals are interconnected in ways invisible to ordinary thought.  But it is not too difficult a stretch of the imagination to move from the memory of coiled smoke arising from my grandmother’s lit sabbath candles to anticipation of whirling flames, like those emitted by the traditional Chinese dragon, that might one day pass over the planet. No matter if the planet is believed to be hexagonal or square, round, or linear as a crystal.

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