Staring Down the Rat

In this week's Index column, I take a look at two poems from the Seamus Heaney collections I picked up earlier this semester, and use them to try to come to terms with processes of change and decay around Kirksville. The column does not mention it, but the poems are from Death of a Naturalist.

Biology Metaphors in Popular Culture

Inspired by Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," in today's column I examine some biological concepts such as "survival of the fittest" and see if the way they are used as metaphors in popular culture actually makes sense anymore.

Hard Times for the Elfin Tailor

College students have a way of getting down on themselves about struggles with their subject. If I'm not able to do this, they say, how am I supposed to do something in this field as a job? Or perhaps it's more along the lines of How does what I'm doing here matter at all? Accordingly, sometimes it's nice to remember where we are and what we are working with—or, as Kay Ryan encourages us to do, balance the daily challenges facing the elfin tailor with the rarity of being an elfin tailor, of being trusted to work with enchanted cloth at all.

Bad Day

Kay Ryan

Not every day

is a good day

for the elfin tailor.

Some days

the stolen cloth

reveals what it

was made for:

a handsome weskit

or the jerkin

of an elfin sailor.

Other days

the tailor

sees a jacket

in his mind

and sets about

to find the fabric.

But some days

neither the idea

nor the material

presents itself;

and these are

the hard days

for the tailor elf.

Finding Walden, Continued

This semester of reading has partly been a search for Thoreau's clarity of vision, mainly through the works of writers who have come after and have felt the same desire. I recently finished two collections of poems by Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist and Field Work. Field Work includes the Glanmore Sonnets and other poems from the four years he spent in a country home in Glanmore, Co. Wicklow with his family after leaving Belfast during The Troubles. Death of a Naturalist you will hear more about soon. Or read it before I have time to spoil it for you. Rarely are you able to find an autobiography that could fit on the sides of a paper crane, a crystallized, solid thing. 

Today began my pilgrimage through Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, her record of a year in the mountains of Virginia in Walden-like solitude. As energetically as I have seen anyone try, she attempts to see the world as if "just set down here," yet at the same time seeking to synthesize the best of what she has seen, read, and struggled with so far. Strangely, these two intentions, though at first seeming to preclude the other, end up supporting each other, like two halves of an arch. She moves from intensely felt observations of reality to Rilkean wondering and wandering at just the right speed:

"We don't know what's going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don't know. Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.

At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, "Come down to the water." It was an extravagant gesture, but we can't do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames."

Index Columns: Truman and Conservation

Last Thursday, I wrote about problems with Bear Creek, the stream that runs through Truman's campus, which the EPA considers an impaired stream. Today, my column considers the benefits of creating a wildlife watching license, as other states have done, that would allow birdwatchers to pay into conservation, which is traditionally supported by hunters and fishers alone. Again, apologies for the lack of paragraph indentation or spacing on the Index website ... Also, the website's teaser for my column describes me as an "enthusiastic" birdwatcher. I don't remember providing such an adjective.