“Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for.”

– Saul Bellow, It All Adds Up

Alaska’s shotgun divorces are rare here in northern Michigan, but our fever can still take alarming forms. Now that we’ve passed February and begun the brutal home stretch, my friends and neighbors have begun exhibiting a variety of symptoms:

– dragging the canoe into the living room, setting it on sawhorses, and spray-painting it yellow.

– signing up for intensive but ultimately fruitless online courses in The Great Books, Spanish, and astronomy.

– engaging in all-night internet and Facebook searches for people not seen in 30 years.

– cooking nonstop all weekend to produce, package, and freeze fifteen gallons of white chili, forty stuffed peppers, a stack of personal-pan pizzas, and a dozen batches of chocolate brownies with walnuts, then going to bed Sunday night with an intense sugar buzz and dreaming about trains going over cliffs.

– reviving hobbies abandoned in childhood: Ham radio, soapbox derby, clipping clothes for paper dolls from magazines, hand-painting toy soldiers organized by the wars they fought in, Monkeys trading cards arranged artfully around perimeter of bedroom mirror. Then abruptly abandoning them again.– inventing deadly new cocktails like the Bloody Monday, Instantaneous Annihilation, Gut Bomb, and What, Me Worry?

– drinking the above-mentioned cocktails while sending emails of apology to everyone they ever wronged.

– dressing the dog in sweaters and socks and filming its hilarious antics for distribution via YouTube.

How about you? Any symptoms yet?

I’ve been studying the history of taxonomy lately and reading Aristotle, Pliny, Linnaeus, and others who have labored mightily to make order in the universe.

But no study of the systems of classification would be complete without mentioning the Jorge Luis Borges story posing as an essay, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” In it Borges mentions a taxonomy of animals that he claims can be found in an old Chinese encyclopedia called The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. If you know Borges you know this encyclopedia is (probably) whimsical, was discovered by a  (perhaps) imaginary scholar, and that the list is as much a commentary on our urge to classify the things of the world as it is a playful exercise in the combinatory agility of words:

According to Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia, animals are divided into:

a) those belonging to the emporer
b) those that are embalmed
c) tame or trained ones
d) suckling pigs
e) mermaids and sirens
f) those that are fabulous
g) stray dogs
h) those included in the present classification
i)  frenzied ones
j) innumerable ones
k) those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
l) other ones
m) those that have recently broken a water pitcher
n) those that from a long way off look like flies

***

The Best Thing I Read Today

This morning I grabbed a favorite book, Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme, opened it at random (my favorite way to read Barthelme), and read the story “Rebecca.” It is about a woman who petitions the court to change her last name from “Lizard,” then visits a dermatologist to see if he can do anything about the slight greenish color of her skin. When both efforts fail she goes home and takes out her anger and frustration on her female lover. Her lover punishes her in turn, saying that she does not find Rebecca’s green skin as beautiful as she once did. They argue, they push each other away, they begin to regret the argument, and they finally make up. This strange and strangely beautiful story ends this way:

“The story ends. It was written for several reasons. Nine of them are secrets. The tenth is that one should never cease considering human love, which remains as grisly and golden as ever, no matter what is tattooed upon the warm tympanic page.”

Every writer has such a drawer. A repository of miscellaneous fragments, discarded first drafts, odd midnight jottings.  A seed bin. A garden plot starting to sprout. A cabinet of literary curiosities.

I have many such drawers. One is an actual drawer. Another is a wire in-box tray  stacked high with hand-written and printed pages stratified like a geological record, with 21st-century layers near the surface and those from the Pleistocene at the bottom. Another is a pile of pages on the floor next to my desk. Half a dozen others are in electronic files with names like NOTES/IDEAS.doc and MISC-ESS.doc.

Why so many junk drawers? Only one reason I can think of: so I can dig into them now and then and discover something surprising.

Today I pawed around a little and found a few items in storage that will probably never make it into print yet give off some faint scent of promise:

…He nurtures heat and rapture. Exults. Sits smugly in his corner. Wolfs, devours, consumes, splays his bird-of-prey shadow over the earth. Carries his urgency with him like a warm pie or a gift.

…I was having recurring malarial dreams of exploding boxcars and talking animals and daylong sleepwalks punctuated by glimpses of distant mountains so clear and intense that I shuddered as if from electric shocks. Much of that year I didn’t know if I was suffering a profound depression or had been graced with a state of purifying clarity. I remember grasping the hands of strangers at the bus station and being instantly aware of the hidden interconnectedness of us all and of everything around us. We are made of the same molecules that once made maple trees and beachstones and snowflakes and snapdragons and will again. The words we speak today will echo in the ears of a child in Zambia a hundred years from now.

…write an essay on the subject of something situated precariously in an infinity of nothing…

…Researchers studying the stages of sleep labeled 3 and 4, or “deep sleep,” say that electrical waves in the brain “roll as slow as mid-ocean waves.”

…What a young writer at the conference told me: “My dad discovered eBay, and, bye-bye my kid brother’s college fund. If you ever need it we have Marilyn Monroe’s driver’s license, a lock of Mick Jagger’s hair, and a signed copy of every album ever made by Abba.”

…The particular is composed of particles that prove, upon examination, to be general.

…We sat on the riverbank and watched a barge heaped with old trombones and tubas go past. The potential for clamor was great. Then it began raining cast-iron skillets and we ran for our lives.

…They’ll try to convince you that you aren’t smart enough to grasp their mighty explanations, not educated in the proper universities, not read in the officially sanctioned books, not conversant in the consensually accepted vocabulary. In short, that you are a subject of the king’s culture. Tell them to fuck off. We’re the cognoscenti of existence.

…Often I would jerk awake in the night or break off during meals or in the middle of a conversation and rush to write sentences that announced themselves urgently, insistently, unbidden…

…Make a patchwork of words & images. Start with strong subject, place/activity, story, compose companion list of associated or random words, ideas, images. Thus: the arch, a trail as an invitation to a destination, the barred owl’s call, the wind breaking through, the surprise around the corner, the destination and what that means. Now weave it into whole cloth…
But where is the flow? Where is the river of words carving a channel through the world?

The Blizzard of ’88 in New York City

As the North digs out from last night’s blizzard, maybe it’s a good time to share an excerpt from It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes about the mega-storm of 1888 and the rather obscure origins of our word “blizzard”:

One of the worst winter storms in United States history came to be known as the Blizzard of ’88 after it struck the eastern U.S. on Monday, March 12, 1888 and lasted through Wednesday, March 14, affecting one-quarter of the nation’s population of the time, and isolating hundreds of cities from Maryland to Maine. The storm halted New York and over a dozen other major cities in their tracks, cutting off virtually all transportation and communication.Winds reached 48 miles per hour in New York City, and snowfall averaged 40 to 50 inches over southern New England and southeastern New York State, with drifts 30 to 40 feet high.

Snowdrifts in Middletown, New York covered three-story houses; townspeople tunneled through, shoring up the tunnels with timbers.  At sea, where mariners called the storm the “Great White Hurricane,” winds up to 90 miles per hour and waves up to three stories high were reported.  At least 198 ships were lost, sunk or grounded, with the loss of about 100 seamen.  On land, the death rate from freezing or storm-related accidents and illnesses approached 300, with 200 dead in New York City alone.  For years people gathered on the anniversary of the blizzard to recall the storm.  Others would never be able to forget it, even if they wanted to:  Dozens of babies born during the storm and shortly after it were named “Blizzard,” “Storm,” “Tempest,”  “Snowdrift,” “Snowflake,” and “Snowdrop.”

The origin of the word “blizzard” is a bit hazy. Some etymologies link it to “blizz,” which was in use in New England as early as 1770 to refer to violent rainstorms.  Other sources suggest a connection with “blaze.” Still others say it was used to denote a “hail of gunfire.” After the Blizzard of ’88 hammered the east coast of the United States then hopped the Atlantic and struck England, the London Times reported the word had long been in used in the English Midlands, where “May I be blizzered” meant to be “bowled over, or knocked off [one’s] feet.”  The New York Times responded indignantly that the word was of American origin and was simply “a bit of onomatopoeia.  Like the hoof-beats in Virgil’s poetry…the word is supposed to sound more or less like the thing it denotes.” This notion is supported in our day by The Oxford English Dictionary, which reports the word is probably “more or less onomatopoeic.”

When the big storm of 1888 finally reached Germany it was already widely referred to as the “American Blizzard.” German newspapers reported the word originated from the German “blitz.” The contemporary American author Gary Lockhart corroborated the German claim (in his book The Weather Companion) with what he claims is the first printed mention of “blizzard,” in a newspaper in Esterville, Iowa, in 1870:  “Many of the early settlers in this area were from Germany, and when witnessing the severe winter storms, would use the German expression ‘Der Sturm kommt blitzartig,’ meaning ‘the storm comes lightning-like.’  The transition from blitzartig to blizzard was a natural language progression.”

I was born on Columbus Day, 1954 and as a child was more than willing to accept the conventional hero stories of that era. Later, when my friends and I were old enough to  read objectively and think for ourselves, many of us became appalled, as are countless others, by the real story of Columbus: the  destruction of native people and their cultures, the cruelty, greed, arrogance.  The writings of European men who came to the New World primarily to plunder it are notoriously unreliable, but now and then you can find a passage that shimmers almost against the writer’s will with astonishment at the natural abundance of North America. To anyone with the capacity to appreciate it, the experience must have been mind-blowing. Although most of the pages of Christopher Columbus’s journals are dry and practical and self-serving, when he wrote about seeing Cuba for the first time, he burst into  poetry.  But notice how quickly the language turns cold as he converts his marvels into commodities:

“…And flocks of parrots that obscure the sun; and there are birds of so many kinds and sizes, and so different from ours, that it is a marvel. And also there are trees of a thousand kinds and all with their own kinds of fruits and all smell so that it is a marvel. I am the most sorrowful man in the world, not being acquainted with them. I am quite certain that all are things of value, and I am bringing samples of them and likewise of the plants.”  

When I was a kid I liked fall best, October especially, month of my birth, of crisp nights and colored leaves, of Halloween and apple cider and firewood to be split and stacked before winter. Summer was trivial, made for children and tourists, but autumn was somber, solemn, mature. It made me impatient to grow up. On windy October and November days when I was twelve years old I would stand on the shore of Long Lake and watch the year get swept away and be overwhelmed with a delicious sorrow. The season clarified me. It was sepulchral. It was elegiac. I savored its bittersweet tang.

Donald Hall writes that Michigan’s fall is like Europe’s – “burnished old gold; yellow harvest mellow with violins; Autumn of the falling fruit and the long journey toward oblivion; muted and melancholy…” – though surely he was thinking of Ann Arbor, where he once lived and taught, and not the wooded and hilly rural north, where autumn’s colors boom in operatic excess. Up here is as different from Ann Arbor as Eagle Pond is from Cambridge. But Hall is right about the melancholy, the falling fruit, and the journey toward oblivion. We have all three in abundance. Every dropped leaf, every skidding rain, every flock of geese passing overhead reminds us of winter’s approach. Were the days a movie, the soundtrack would be mostly cellos. We grow suddenly impatient and hurry outside to gather all the music and fragrance we can hold, stocking up on sensations for the sterile months ahead. If we must stay indoors we put on a kettle of water for tea, settle into a chair beside the fireplace, and open the first of the season’s thick novels. Either way, we’re digging in against oblivion…

[from "The Several Autumns," by Jerry Dennis. Originally published in Dunes Review and reprinted in Orion, and to be included in my forthcoming collection, The World at Hand: Essays in Four Seasons.]

On the “make lemonade” premise I considered writing a diet book, one that was sure to hurl to the top of bestseller lists. It would be titled:  Lose 10 Pounds in 8 Hours! The Contaminated Food Diet!

Instead I’m content to live the rest of my life with an abnormal fear of turkey-and-hummus  roll-ups left sitting for ten hours on the seat of my car, frequently in sunlight, while I negotiate the usual insane traffic mayhem across southern Ontario until I’m so exhausted and famished that I eat those lukewarm packets of infection despite the voice in my head warning me that it might be a bad idea.

My sources tell me there might not be a name for such a phobia.

But late that night, in my room at Queen’s University in Kingston, after the fourth or fifth time I scuttled to the bathroom shuddering with fever and put my head in the toilet, I thought, “Hey! I’ll compile a list of other interesting phobias!”

Turns out it’s a long list. Here’s an abbreviated version:

Fear of blushing (erythrophobia)

of books (bibliophobia)

of children (pedophobia)

of deep water (bathophobia)

of fresh air (aerophobia)

of dust (koniophobia)

of flowers (anthophobia)

of food (cibophobia) [GETTING CLOSE]

of frogs or toads (batrachophobia)

of God’s wrath (theophobia) [GETTING CLOSER]

of hair (chaetophobia)

of light or the sun (photophobia)

of motion or wandering (dromophobia)

of novelty (neophobia)

of perfection (teleophobia)

of imperfection (atelophobia)

of poison (toxicophobia) [BINGO!]

of sleep (hypnophobia)

of sounds or speaking (phonophobia)

of standing still (stasophobia)

of strong or rapid breathing (pantophobia)

of the number 13 (triskaidekaphobia)

of words (logophobia)

of work (ergophobia)

of everything (panphobia)