Visitations

Louisiana fog is a weird kind of fog. You can sort of see the sun behind it, like in San Francisco, but Spanish moss makes the whole thing unsettling. On the way out to the cemetery I visit every time I come home, we pass a huge bayou filled with ducks and a few egrets. The ducks walk over to a nearby gas station that has a donut shop. Anyway, while at the fog-filled cemetery, my mom saw a chicken not too far off from where we were standing, the place our family always stands when we go out there. Did the chicken escape from a farm? I also wondered if maybe someone was recently practicing voodoo, but chickens involved with voodoo are generally sacrificed. They say most houses in New Orleans have chicken heads buried in the backyards. The fog has burned off and I remember now that I wanted to write about a certain hate-filled, conservative town, but all I can think about is that chicken. I hope it doesn't get hit by a lawnmower.

I've Already Been Called a Yankee Three Times This Trip

My niece/sister complained that she was surrounded by Yankees on the way to my folks' house in the middle of Louisiana. She was sitting between the old man and I. He, clearly, is a Yankee, who pauses before answering most southerners because he doesn't want to say the wrong thing or he didn't understand what was said to him. Am I a Yankee? I remember the first time my niece/sister asked me what a Yankee was. We'd been at a family reunion and apparently she heard someone call me that. When I was in college, I had a friend who thought anyone who lived north of Shreveport, Louisiana was a Yankee.

So maybe I'm part Yankee, no? Is that even allowed? At a wedding this weekend someone asked me if I was originally from Brooklyn and I found myself saying yes. She looked so impressed. The old man corrected me, of course, explaining that I had southern people and the whole moving around thing. Tonight, while at an all-you-can-eat soul food buffet restaurant, our waitress kept calling me baby and asked me if I was okay and did I want more sticky buns. I wanted so badly to say yes ma'am and thank you very much, but all I could muffle out was oh yes and thanks. My mouth was full of sweet potatoes and I felt like I didn't have any manners, but really I hate manners and I hate even more that I felt embarrassed for not having much of a southern accent. I just wanted her to stay talking.

It is the end of squirrel hunting season and the beginning of deer hunting season. In the middle of Louisiana, many folk are walking around in weird camo or orange pants. It's unsettling, knowing what they're doing out there in the woods, the camo being so obvious, the shooting, the killing, the skinning, and the potential eating. Someone's freezer is gointabe full, you know what I'm sayin? I know what your pants mean, you know what I'm sayin?

Laura Marling on a Warm October Night

The old man and I went to see Laura Marling play last night at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, which used to be known as North Six. The old man and I went on our first date there, standing awkwardly next to each other as Dirty Rainbow blasted out our ear drums.

I was incredibly looking forward to seeing Laura Marling and didn't at all expect her voice to be so drippingly soulful. Her album really doesn't do it justice. Her voice (in person) is edgier and textured, like looking at a painting after having seen the print. She sang songs from her second album, which sounds pretty damn good.

Laura Marling sparks in me the (VERY) occasional comfort I have with growing older. It's nice to grow older if it means you get to see young people like her come along. I don't mean in any following-in-my-footsteps, bullshitty kind of way. What I mean to say is that all is not lost because someone comes after you, someone really great, someone within your lifetime. I guess this goes without saying, but I was filled with so much admiration while watching Laura Marling on stage. Her new songs are so wise in this brilliant but structured sort of way and you can't help but want to sit her down and say where did you get it? She truly is awe-inspiring.

The Hat Box Has Come Down

I've been hunkering down with Bernd Heinrich's Winter World, which details how animals survive during winter. When bears hibernate, their heartbeats slow down to almost eight or less per minute. Some turtles bury themselves in mud and can hold their breath for thirty of winter's coldest days. The winter world of the book is focused on New England, as Heinrich resides in Maine and Vermont. (New England winters are easy to romanticize, especially if you're not from there. Have you ever been night skiing on lantern lit lanes? Sigh now). My only complaint about the book is that Heinrich often takes babies (a flying squirrel baby to be exact) from their sleeping mothers and takes nests home with him to study. Can't he observe without stealing?

Anyway, snowshoe hares change from brown to white during winter. The color change takes about a month, which can make hares a target for predators during early snowfall (and they are still brown) or late snowfall; the hares turn completely white by late November. Heinrich wonders if the hares know about their color change, that they are practically invisible once they are white. Heinrich writes, "I doubt that a hare knows whether or not it is invisible because the totally white hares I've seen on brown background made no apparent effort to hide" (26). I couldn't help but think about Rilke's "The Eighth Elegy," which addresses how, according to Rilke, animals aren't encumbered by death because they, more or less, aren't hampered by the world. He establishes the idea of the Open, an eternal/God-type realm, a forward sort of place that isn't the future. We are so apart of the world, we think, that when we die we leave this world. Only when we are close to death are we over it. Rilke writes, "For close to death one sees death no longer/ and stares out instead, perhaps with the wide gaze of animals" (lines 22-23). Rilke couldn't be talking about any real animals, just the animals of example, eating their berries and nibbling their hind quarters until they get hit by a car or something. Who can say what animals are and aren't aware of, but the idea that on the animals v. human scale, one of us contributes to a cycle of life while the other takes the Harold and Maud approach, to live life to the fullest because you aren't going to be around forever. Sounds as though it were freeing, right? But we know it's just a confident sort of fear, a fear with tree planting and hearse stealing...

Heinrich often reminds me that the chipmunks and the snowshoe hares will be eaten, will be the winter meal of another animal desperate to overload on calories before cozying up with its young somewhere safe. Have a listen to "The Eighth Elegy" by Rainer Maria Rilke, from his Duino Elegies translated by Edward Snow.

More Eyes that Slant, More Woolens

We left the city yesterday in windy rainy weather for the last day of the New York Sheep and Wool Festival. For the first time I saw cashmere sheep and Leicesters (they have fur not wool), and petted some Alpaca and merino sheep. The whole thing about livestock is so weird. Livestock. When eating becomes feeding, a year before dying. We just sort of take everything from these scared little creatures: their bones become plates, their milk for cheese, their wool becomes yarn, this yarn becomes superwash merino that I'm going to knit into socks. I worked on a sheep farm and we always knew that before winter, most of the lambs would be loaded up and sent to Blood Slaughterhouse. Even my friend #4 who would ram my butt while I was changing out the water.

After livestock we went to Woodstock where friends of ours just had twins. The babies were sleeping in two baskets on their living room table. I read books to their toddler and one of the babies woke up and puked on one of my friends. It seemed so nice, being new, sleeping wherever someone puts you, being little. One of the trees outside their house had turned bright red. Funny how October is almost over.

Children Are you Still Feral

Last night I asked the old man if there could possibly be feral children running around, you know the kind that run with the wolves and tigers, the kind that don't know language, the kind who scratch. In the old man's cynic ease he said something about terrible parents who abandon their children, you know, of course there are feral children running around. Who is the cynic here: the one who thinks the world is too picked over, that there is no more such thing as being feral OR the one who thinks a feral child is a product of the ultimate human abandonment. I have a friend who went backpacking around the world and she said that everywhere she went, she stepped on a soda can or plastic bottle, even in freezing temperatures, even in the jungle.

I started Bhanu Kapil's Humanimal last night. The text itself is kind of strange, switching between a large print narrative, the writings of Reverend Joseph Singh (the man who found two girls living among wolves), and Kapil's journey through her research of the two girls' story as Singh tries to make them upright. I couldn't take my eyes off the photograph of the two girls, given to Kapil by Singh's great-great-granddaughter. The girls are lying naked on top of animal pelts (?) or blankets in the middle of perhaps a grassy field/road next to a white building. They are both little and their hair is shorn to their scalps. One of the girls sleeps fetal and the other sleeps over her. I want to be both of them at the same time, their comfort and discomfort, long toes, longish arms, someone you don't want to put a blanket over.

List: Temporal Art

• light on hair
• heirloom tomato salad
• food in teeth
• wet receipts
• nestlike pile of cat hair behind the door
• where sneezes land
• breathing newspaper in the subway
• tired eyes
• you know what
• two bikes locked together (they love each other!)
• pile of roasted vegetables, mostly orange
• falling asleep with a book
• falling asleep with a pen
• steamed milk in coffee