Literature
This morning, I'm not really sure why, I head for the river at the perfectly unreasonable hour of 4:30. As I walk through the silent neighborhoods cast in streetlight glow, I catch glimpses of countless cats slinking and darting under cars, and I witness the death (or at least discarding) of Santa Claus. It occurs to me that I have set out far too early: it won't be light for an hour and a half. What am I doing?
My path to the river skirts the edge of the zoo, and a pungent waft of giraffe dung envelops me. I hear a scream/bark/wail issuing repeatedly from somewhere deep in the zoo. The walk has been eerie enough up to this point, and the zoo sounds tip things farther in that direction?it's depressing, and I am tempted to turn around and walk straight home. Even as I head toward the wild fish of the murky Mississippi, the zoo reminds me of the words of Randy Malamud, concerning how "little space remains in our minds to consider any animals besides these weird ones foregrounded in our cultural frames."
I remain rather conflicted about my fishing excursions, and I go through periods where I feel uncertain about whether to continue fishing or not. I try to practice ethical catch-and-release protocols and careful handling of the fish; still, it's hard to get around the baseline violence of forcibly embedding a hook in another creature's mouth. But I'm too close to the river now, and anyway I have a new fishing rod that I am excited to try. (My old one, which I bought in Driggs, Idaho about thirteen years ago, is really better suited to trout rivers and streams.)
When I get to the river it is ridiculously dark. I can't even see well enough to tie a fly to my line. It's nearly pitch black, but I can tell that the river has dropped a couple feet; I don't recognize the same place where I fished a week ago. I'm tentative about wading into unfamiliar water while it's still so dark. It's not even 5:00 yet. There is a lot of boat activity, tankers and tugboats with barges cruising by, and distant boings and clangs coming from the docks across the river. I sit down on the riprap and assemble my rod. I look across the river, and I think back on the zoo.
One of the books that my boy Julien loves to read at bedtime is a zoo story called Goodnight Gorilla. The basic story is that a zookeeper puts all the animals to bed one by one, and a gorilla (the first to be put to bed) gets hold of the keys and lets all the animals back out of their cages as the sleepy and unknowing zookeeper goes about his business. The animals orchestrate a surprise toward the end.
There's also an embedded narrative in this book: it's located in that seemingly innocuous object of the red balloon that, if you look closely, a mouse is untying from the cage bars. Over the course of the book, the balloon drifts away, and yet appears on every page. See the balloon floating in the upper middle of the page, in the distance over the main action:
This is not the red balloon of the eponymous film from 1956. In that story, the balloon is the story, it guides the action and drama. The balloon becomes a friend, an accomplice, and a sustained flight of fancy.
The red balloon in Goodnight Gorilla, on the other hand, is just there. It's just hanging in every page, getting smaller but always existing?if sometimes only apparent by its black waving string. It occurred to me, sitting there in the dark, that the river is more like the this balloon than the balloon in The Red Balloon. The Mississippi is just there, and always going away. It slips by seemingly endlessly, whether you focus on it or not. It winds around the city, above the city even?this realization hits you sometimes when you're walking down the street in New Orleans and you have a view down toward the river, and you see the mast of a tanker cruising by, and you have to look up to see it.
It's finally light out, so I scramble down to the river.
This morning becomes more of a scavenging project than anything else?the fish aren't as active as the last time, and with the river level down, a lot of mucky bank is exposed. I discover all sorts of things, from a washed up crab...
...to a machined looking thing, some part of some apparatus long since rendered inoperable.
I fish for a while, but I don't catch anything today. I get the hang of my new outfit, enjoying the hiss of fresh fly-line shooting through the rod's eyelets. Before Brian shows up, it's just me and two bitterns stealthily stalking fish in the shallows. Mostly I find myself feeling overwhelmed by the mass of moving water, aware of its magnitude, muddiness, and beauty?but also wary of the limits of my own awareness of the river. Heraclitus said you can't step in the same river twice; I'm not sure if you can even step into a river once as a discrete, knowable thing.
- River Notes
As I've been spending more time standing in and walking along the Mississippi River on recent mornings, I've also been thinking back to an earlier time in my life when I worked as a river guide in Wyoming for a couple summers, toward the end...
- Morning Walk Photo Essay Ii
It was about a year ago that I posted my first morning walk photo essay; I figured today that it was time to post a second one. (I find myself telling students that things become so much more interesting when you do them multiple times?like reading,...
- More Faces & Figures, This Time On Autoracks
This morning I saw more faces and figures on "autoracks" as they passed?a great rat, a snowman, a mystery visage, and some sort of hooded ninja: As I watched these faces roll by I was reminded of when I lived in Montana and saw similarly striking...
- Morning Walk Photo Essay
Most mornings these days, I go for a walk to the Mississippi River with my small roommate, Julien. This morning I decided to record my walk by taking some photos that show the things we encountered along the way. Julien doesn't walk yet, so I push...
- Perspectivism In "the Vagrants"
Yiyun Li?s novel The Vagrants is a staggering work of narrative perspectivism. By this I mean to describe how the novel moves fluidly between many different characters; over the course of three hundred pages, each character gradually yet steadily takes...
Literature
Dark River Balloon
This morning, I'm not really sure why, I head for the river at the perfectly unreasonable hour of 4:30. As I walk through the silent neighborhoods cast in streetlight glow, I catch glimpses of countless cats slinking and darting under cars, and I witness the death (or at least discarding) of Santa Claus. It occurs to me that I have set out far too early: it won't be light for an hour and a half. What am I doing?
My path to the river skirts the edge of the zoo, and a pungent waft of giraffe dung envelops me. I hear a scream/bark/wail issuing repeatedly from somewhere deep in the zoo. The walk has been eerie enough up to this point, and the zoo sounds tip things farther in that direction?it's depressing, and I am tempted to turn around and walk straight home. Even as I head toward the wild fish of the murky Mississippi, the zoo reminds me of the words of Randy Malamud, concerning how "little space remains in our minds to consider any animals besides these weird ones foregrounded in our cultural frames."
I remain rather conflicted about my fishing excursions, and I go through periods where I feel uncertain about whether to continue fishing or not. I try to practice ethical catch-and-release protocols and careful handling of the fish; still, it's hard to get around the baseline violence of forcibly embedding a hook in another creature's mouth. But I'm too close to the river now, and anyway I have a new fishing rod that I am excited to try. (My old one, which I bought in Driggs, Idaho about thirteen years ago, is really better suited to trout rivers and streams.)
When I get to the river it is ridiculously dark. I can't even see well enough to tie a fly to my line. It's nearly pitch black, but I can tell that the river has dropped a couple feet; I don't recognize the same place where I fished a week ago. I'm tentative about wading into unfamiliar water while it's still so dark. It's not even 5:00 yet. There is a lot of boat activity, tankers and tugboats with barges cruising by, and distant boings and clangs coming from the docks across the river. I sit down on the riprap and assemble my rod. I look across the river, and I think back on the zoo.
One of the books that my boy Julien loves to read at bedtime is a zoo story called Goodnight Gorilla. The basic story is that a zookeeper puts all the animals to bed one by one, and a gorilla (the first to be put to bed) gets hold of the keys and lets all the animals back out of their cages as the sleepy and unknowing zookeeper goes about his business. The animals orchestrate a surprise toward the end.
There's also an embedded narrative in this book: it's located in that seemingly innocuous object of the red balloon that, if you look closely, a mouse is untying from the cage bars. Over the course of the book, the balloon drifts away, and yet appears on every page. See the balloon floating in the upper middle of the page, in the distance over the main action:
The red balloon in Goodnight Gorilla, on the other hand, is just there. It's just hanging in every page, getting smaller but always existing?if sometimes only apparent by its black waving string. It occurred to me, sitting there in the dark, that the river is more like the this balloon than the balloon in The Red Balloon. The Mississippi is just there, and always going away. It slips by seemingly endlessly, whether you focus on it or not. It winds around the city, above the city even?this realization hits you sometimes when you're walking down the street in New Orleans and you have a view down toward the river, and you see the mast of a tanker cruising by, and you have to look up to see it.
It's finally light out, so I scramble down to the river.
This morning becomes more of a scavenging project than anything else?the fish aren't as active as the last time, and with the river level down, a lot of mucky bank is exposed. I discover all sorts of things, from a washed up crab...
I fish for a while, but I don't catch anything today. I get the hang of my new outfit, enjoying the hiss of fresh fly-line shooting through the rod's eyelets. Before Brian shows up, it's just me and two bitterns stealthily stalking fish in the shallows. Mostly I find myself feeling overwhelmed by the mass of moving water, aware of its magnitude, muddiness, and beauty?but also wary of the limits of my own awareness of the river. Heraclitus said you can't step in the same river twice; I'm not sure if you can even step into a river once as a discrete, knowable thing.
- River Notes
As I've been spending more time standing in and walking along the Mississippi River on recent mornings, I've also been thinking back to an earlier time in my life when I worked as a river guide in Wyoming for a couple summers, toward the end...
- Morning Walk Photo Essay Ii
It was about a year ago that I posted my first morning walk photo essay; I figured today that it was time to post a second one. (I find myself telling students that things become so much more interesting when you do them multiple times?like reading,...
- More Faces & Figures, This Time On Autoracks
This morning I saw more faces and figures on "autoracks" as they passed?a great rat, a snowman, a mystery visage, and some sort of hooded ninja: As I watched these faces roll by I was reminded of when I lived in Montana and saw similarly striking...
- Morning Walk Photo Essay
Most mornings these days, I go for a walk to the Mississippi River with my small roommate, Julien. This morning I decided to record my walk by taking some photos that show the things we encountered along the way. Julien doesn't walk yet, so I push...
- Perspectivism In "the Vagrants"
Yiyun Li?s novel The Vagrants is a staggering work of narrative perspectivism. By this I mean to describe how the novel moves fluidly between many different characters; over the course of three hundred pages, each character gradually yet steadily takes...