Tabla de contenidos para Winter 2022 en Orion

THIS FALL we had the pleasure of cosponsoring a few stellar events. In September, Orion contributing editor Ross Gay joined host Randy Cohen on his Person Place Thing podcast to discuss parents, pawpaws, the admirable democracy of pickup basketball, and Ross’s new book Inciting Joy. A few weeks later we officially launched our autumn issue with a memorable conversation between Orion contributing editor John Freeman and legendary author Sandra Cisneros about her new poetry collection, Woman Without Shame, and related essay, “The Beautiful Unforeseen,” featured in the issue. Then Lulu Miller, Robert Michael Pyle, Scott Black, David Quammen, and our bug-loving friends at the Xerces Society joined us to celebrate the release of our newest diminutive anthology, The Book of Bugs: The Best Writing about Insects, Arachnids, and Other Arthropods…

TONIGHT, after three years in the skyscraper shadows, the ratty abandoned lots bordering tech-money opulence, the soul-wringing poverty and relentless ambulance scream of it all, I saw my first San Franciscan skunks. As in plural. As in two of them. As in black-and-white and bounding across the street, their tails lush and large, their pointy snouts pointing them ever deeper into the great adventure of Being. Maybe I cried a few joyful expletives, or maybe I wet myself a thimble’s worth, or maybe I merely stopped and stared and smiled over the unexpected encounter. It was a rush, a fantastic Mephitis mephitis blur. Understand, dear reader, that the bulk of my discretionary time is spent rambling and roaming, combing shrubs and climbing trees, poking into the nooks and cramming into…

SOMETIMES I am jealous of the silver-backed shad swimming beneath the glittering rain. Jealous of the shad who darts between the maze of beech roots in the park near home. A silver-backed fish, in its mossy meandering upstream, does not pause, even for food. No, the fish, in its dream of spawning—slips over rocks and between quiet pools, pursues not bottlenose flies, nor water striders, is undeterred by anything in its watery path. Unlike the fish, who has achieved quiet purpose, I wander alone through a labyrinth of city streets, distracted by every envelope of artificial light, by acres of power lines, and the blued space between trees. I lift my phone repetitious as an automaton, reading and reading, sending words to flit round the city. All the while, I…

SOMEWHERE in the reefy waters of the Indo-Pacific, a daisy parrotfish (Chlorurus sordidus) is feasting on coral. She crunches up the hard knobs of calcium carbonate with her tough beaklike teeth, digesting the algae that once covered it and expelling the rest as tidy piles of fresh sand in her wake. It’s relentless work, and by the day’s end, having chewed through enough coral to create several handfuls of sand, our fish is exhausted. But she has more work to do before she can rest. Little by little, she begins to excrete a gelatinous substance that balloons from her mouth, forming a roomy spit sack large enough to envelop her entire body from tip to Technicolor tail. She’s Glinda the Good Witch, snug in her pink bubble: a small shimmering…

WE FOUND THIS STONE on the beach at Cape Meares, Oregon. We’d flown to Austin, rented a car, driven to LA to see friends, then headed up the coast as far as Portland. Two thousand miles in two weeks. Desert, mountain, forest, and ocean. Mile upon mile of empty, potholed, arrow-straight roads. Our headlights cutting the night. Giant birds looming through our windshield. Unknown animals darting recklessly under our wheels. Trees, tumbleweeds, cactuses, all a shifting blur. Our pictures are hallucinations. We drove through the Southwest, spent a day at Taos Pueblo, most of another at Meteor Crater, visited the Petrified Forest, and stopped to gaze at the vast fact of Shiprock erupting from the New Mexico desert. Stone. A planet of stone. At Cape Meares, we walked along the…

A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO, I met a musician who had lost his heart to city birds. He took me under his proverbial wing and, for a year, I played newborn bird(er) to his Konrad Lorenz, following him through seasonal shifts and migrations on an unlikely urban bird odyssey. Approximately four hundred bird species have been recorded in the city of Toronto. When we set off on our first walk, I knew of only a handful. We “see” merely a tiny fraction of what is actually going on around us. Over time the significance of this fact deepened and became graspable to me. One day, as we were seated in the dirt and grass, surrounded by insects and a few chipping sparrows, the musician said he wished humans were smaller,…

THE ELEVATED cardboard box sits discreetly at the side of my couch. It draws no attention to itself, emitting little more than a whiff of woodsy vitality. And yet this box—my compost—is nonetheless a site of great activity. In my apartment, nowhere is busier, nowhere more exciting. I remove the white fabric cover and thrust a hand into the ongoing decomposition. The peat is grainy black, crumbly but damp, studded with the colorful remains of a dozen meals past: orange rinds, turnip tops, apple peels. Several inches down, near the reinforced base, my fingers register pockets of warmth. They thrill me, these thermal indicators that it’s working, that the mites and motes are actively devouring their way through my table scraps. I picture these microscopic agents as little Pac-men and-women,…

To depict a loveless and macabre world—a world of the scarecrow acting as the Lord of blood-thirsty crows, of the harridan decked out as a beauty queen … a world of debased flesh and servile manners…. This bitter vision of reality may not be the whole truth. —Faiz Ahmed Faiz on the art of Sadequain IT IS RAINING IN KARACHI as I write this, an ugly, punishing rain that returns with increasing fury every year. This year, as every year, the monsoon is supposed to be the “worst ever,” and, like every year, the city’s flimsy slums and crater-riven roads will collapse with the weight of the rain. On these deadly rainy days, the water that falls from above meets the sewage that bubbles up from below, both equally careless…

SEEDS ARE MADE to survive hardship. They’ve evolved in both obvious and surprising ways, some with shells as hard and smooth as ocean-worn stone to withstand the beak of a crow or the heel of a hiking boot; others, topped with a helicopter of silken hairs, to spin and dive on a breeze. They know how to hitch rides on the wings and backs of animals and have adapted to the various obstacles on their way to a fertile landing spot. Last fall I visited Roberta Bailey, a sort of freelance seed saver. She’d recently retired from Fedco Seeds, one of the only seed co-ops in the country, and was now growing a variety of edible crops, harvesting their seeds, and sending them to businesses like Fedco and Johnny’s, another…

IN A FEW MINUTES, the air-raid siren will begin to wail. “The kid is dragging his neighbor’s bodies,” Zarina says. “Adults, children, all morning. He’s dragging them from the rubble of a bombed-out building. I ask him questions but all he wants to talk about is nails and a hammer to repair the window. That’s all he speaks of. Hammer. Nails.” We are sitting in a restaurant on Kanatnaya Street in Odesa, Ukraine. Zarina looks straight at me. “He was dragging grandmothers and moms and toddlers from under the rubble.” Instead of running to the shelter, Zarina will ask if I would like more cognac. Surreal to be clinking glasses and continuing our dinner during the air raid. But that’s what we do. “The city itself helps to get over…

RATHER RECENTLY I began a series of tiny carvings, perhaps inspired by the scope of my earliest professional artworks, a series of very small gouache paintings—homages to Persian and Indian miniatures from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The process of immersing myself in their worlds illuminated how tiny work necessarily has a wholly different focus, meaning, and mindset from the modern urge to scale and show. Netsuke, miniature Japanese sculpture, have a magical Alice-in-Wonderland otherworldliness, a forced concentration, which is distinct from the flashy eye-busting speed of our commercial culture. Hans Holbein’s tiny Dance of Death woodcuts (2 x 3 inches), created between 1523 and 1525, show the same inward-looking brain-picking. Nuns from France painted tiny watercolors of tortured saints, the size of playing cards, on which to meditate, understand,…

MY MOTHER GREW UP in the town of Chidambaram in South India, bathing in the sacred kulams (traditional rectangular water basins). Chidambaram’s ancient Tamil name is Thillai, which is also the name of a sacred tree (Excoecaria agallocha) that grows in the saline waters in the nearby Pichavaram mangrove forests. The town itself was once enveloped by these forests. Thillai Kali Amman is also the name of a goddess, and a modest temple was built for her in Chidambaram. This goddess is highly unusual as she has two different presentations: one fierce, facing east, and one peaceful, facing west. Some years ago, my cousin Visu took me to visit Thillai Kali Amman’s temple. I performed the ritual clockwise circumambulation of the goddess. Circling the square stone plinth surrounding her icon,…

TWO HUNDRED and fifty thousand mold spores can fit on the head of a pin. These microscopic fairies stay inert for weeks, hovering in the air around us, waiting for a warm, damp opportunity to strike. To multiply. They inhabit the fuzzy boundaries between physics and biology, life and not-yet-life. Is and is not. As a human living in the Anthropocene, I like to think that I have substantial control over at least some of the life around me. I can build walls. Doors. A roof. I can decide who comes in. But once something is built, the mold spores will inevitably descend. Idol-makers in the South Indian temple town where I grew up believe that chiseling the eyes turns an inert statue divine. This step of breathing life into…

1. It’s evening in New York. In my Brooklyn apartment’s tiny office, I’m watching an informational video for the third time, and I’m still confused. “All chips start out with a very simple raw material: sand.” So begins “The making of a chip—from sand to semiconductor,” posted by Infineon Technologies, a multibillion-dollar corporation and one of the largest semiconductor manufacturing companies in the world. “Microelectronics usually are hidden to society—however, [they are] a constant companion in our daily lives,” the caption reads. “But what is actually behind this technology?” Infineon’s video is minced by technical jargon that eludes me: phrases like “p-conductive,” “doped wafer,” “crypto chips,” “plasma etching,” “electrically conductive polysilicon.” I shut my laptop and call my brother Nick. “Can you tell me,” I ask in exasperation, “in layperson…

I. The New Year At the moment of its birth, the snail is cursed with a shell that needs to be built. At first, the shell is soft like new jelly, and the newborn, instinctively craving calcium to make it hard and protective, eats its own egg. In this way, its old home becomes its new home, which is a comfort, and mitigates the violence of being born. But the snail has also been born into the condition of being ravenous, and from this it will never recover. Even fully grown, the snail will constantly search for calcium-rich environments to scavenge, slowly scraping its radula over ground and rock to sustain its home. To carry one’s home, one’s shell, is to be tied to unquenchable desire. This is what the…

THE FIRST RULE OF Borrowing, a father tells his daughter in Mary Norton’s Borrowers, is that “a Borrower must never be seen.” But like in Fight Club, the story is dependent on this rule being broken. And so Arrietty, a girl two and a half inches tall, steps forth onto a boy’s palm and looks at his skin: a landscape, a touch, a stage. This is the most intimate it gets, for two beings who are too far apart in scale to hold a handshake or a kiss. If our imagination of the gigantic is of calamity, of sudden, unexpected disaster—Godzilla emerging from Tokyo Bay, tsunami and nuclear devastation embodied in one lurching beam—then the world of the tiny is about the everydayness of extinction. Perched on a giant hand,…