Inhoudsopgave van May / June 2011 - Orion

IT IS HARDER to get caught up in the natural mysteries of the planet than it used to be. That’s a generalization no doubt some would argue with, but there would be more who would agree. People are busier and more distracted, by the stress of their lives, the intrusion of modern media, and the knowledge that the global environment is under siege. And so, in trying to get reconnected with the planet it is good to have a guide, one who can teach you how to watch, how to use your senses, how to be patient, and how to understand how immersion in a place, or in a moment, can transform your relationship with the world. In Orion’s earliest days, when its editors were trying to find their way…

“What It Is That Feeds Us” (July/August 2010), by BK Loren, has been selected for the Best American Spiritual Writing 2012 anthology. Terry Tempest Williams’s essay “The Gulf Between Us” (November/December 2010) was a finalist for the Southern Environmental Law Center’s Reed Writing Award in the category of journalism. Editor-in-Chief Chip Blake, Associate Editor Hannah Fries, and Editorial Assistant Kristen Hewitt traveled to Washington DC in February for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference. Orion presented two panels and cohosted a reception with Poets & Writers. Editor Jennifer Sahn traveled to Iowa in February for the seventh annual Symposium on Wildness, Wilderness & the Creative Imagination at Iowa State University, where she participated in a panel on the publishing industry. The tenth annual International Women’s Day Conference, with…

Opening the psalms,letting in whole daysbetween lying downin the shade of a valleyand a path’s steep climb. Opening to the psalmsthat don’t seem like psalmsand the ones that do,that send roots into the river likeweeping overheard. The wrist of a psalm.A garment being torn.The plowman’s psalm.The warrior’s. The prisoner’s.The king’s. The seeds of a psalmlost to us, lost in timeon a hill of apricot treesoverlooking a citywith its alleys, its gates opening to the psalms the wayfolded paper flowersopen from a shelldropped in a glass of water,swaying open, blossoming.…

The tanagers have returned to my dead plum tree—they sip the pond through narrow beaks.Orange and yellow, this recurrencethat comes with each year’s baby leaves. And if the tree is a church and spring is Sunday,the birds are fancy hats of women breaking into song.Or say the tree is an old car whose tank is full,then the birds are girls on a joy ridecrammed in its seats. Or if the tree is the carnivallighting the tarmac of the abandoned mall by the freewaythen the birds are the men with pocketkniveswho erect its Ferris wheel. Or say the tree is the boat that chugs into portto fill its hold and deck with logs,then the birds are the Russian sailors whorise in the morning in the streets where they’ve slept,rubbing their heads…

IT USED TO BE, if we had an important question about life, we could visit the oracle, perched on her tripod over a vent in the earth. We would bring her honey cakes of devotion and ask her: “Should I cross the river tonight?” “Why is there a pall over my heart?” or “Should I marry Cyril?” She would wait for the earth to exhale and then, exhilarated by the vapors, she would reply, “Oaths are like paper feet” and “Find where the goat loves salt water” and “Wing-a-willow-way-away.” Her messages were as intelligible as the messages of wind chimes. But now when we visit the tripods all we find perched there are cameras, hardly reminiscent of the oracles—they are literal thinkers, like most anyone we ask for advice. “You…

about the shadow people,who live among us,who through the grassy gutsof the country are building a highway— a thing to carrythe strange and the sorry, the muscled and the unwilling,the rabid, the lonely, the old— those with rags for clothes,those with less than rags, with cardboard, with horse hair,hot tar, river water, acres of dung, acres of dust—God yes they are the ones who from rusted cans eat with bent spoons,who let the sun speak to them in the lost tongue of the first lovers,who grow wings and walk still— God yes they are the oneswho from our kitchens steal the toaster, the sugar drawer, the ideaof the sugar drawer, from our lungs steal song— God yes they are the ones—who with their animals eyes and teeth like sorry stars…

BY MARK HERTSGAARD Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. $25, 352 pages. IF YOU HAVE children underfoot and climate change on your mind, journalist Mark Hertsgaard has written a book that will scare the breath out of you while still offering some hope for surviving the coming heat. The book’s dedication page sums it up: “For my daughter, Chiara, who has to live through this.” I’m the father of a thirteen-year-old Boy Scout, baseball catcher, and curb-jumping skater dude, so I was hooked from word one of Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years. Hertsgaard, who writes frequently about global warming for the likes of Vanity Fair and The Nation, wonders how so many parents can pack healthy school lunches for their kids and hold their hands through traffic but not act…

BY WIESŁAW MYŚLIWSKI (translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston) Archipelago Books, 2010. $20, 534 pages. "STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS " narration is the oft-used phrase, but it would be more apt to call Stone Upon Stone’s first-person narration “sea-of-consciousness.” Protagonist Szymek Pietruszka’s horizon-wide, memory-laced delivery seems at the mercy of not just one but many currents, complete with austere distances, undertows, and sudden drop-offs. Rendered impeccably from Myśliwski’s Polish by translator Bill Johnston, Szymek’s voice is a plot in itself, reminiscent of such recent late-inlife yarn spinners as John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Donald in Jim Harrison’s Returning to Earth. Myśliwski’s ranging prose hits many registers and powers the story with both discursiveness and striking precision. That Stone Upon Stone reads like the grand novel it is, not a novel…

BY KATHERINE WARE Museum of New Mexico Press, 2011. $39.95, 188 pages. Earth Now: American Photographers and the Environment surveys the long history of photography’s role in environmental issues. Author Katherine Ware (curator of photography at the New Mexico Museum of Art) leads the reader on an illustrated journey starting with the literal work of the survey photographers of the 1860s and the romantic idealism of Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, and moving on to include other well-known landscape photographers such as Robert Adams, Richard Misrach, and Mark Klett. But the most interesting insights and examinations Earth Now offers surround the eclectic mix of contemporary artists who apply everything from documentary to conceptual art in their efforts to deal with topics like water and land use, food, waste, pollution, energy,…

FRIEND OF MINE out in the woods here in Oregon has invented what he calls the Elkometer, a device to measure, as he says, the proximity, relative health, weight, age, gender, dietary preferences, predation paranoia (by species), and education level of the population of Roosevelt elk living in the vast rainforest abutting his property, which is so deep in the woods your car groans and mutters as you start off on the rutted mud road that leads, after several years, to his slab house, built from fir and cedar he felled himself when we were young. I asked him what he meant by education level and he pointed out that elk are like any other species, they have a stunning learning curve in their opening scenes onstage, without which, as…

Jennifer Barber is the author of the poetry collection Rigging the Wind and the forthcoming Given Away, and has been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. Clare Cavanagh, translator of Adam Zagajewski’s poem in this issue, is a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland and the author of several books, including, most recently, the novel Mink River. Bruce Haley is the recipient of the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the civil war in Burma. His new monograph Sunder was published by Daylight/Charta. Robin Hemley is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction. He is a senior editor of The Iowa Review, editor of Defunct,…

PART ONE The Allure of Easy Cheese I’m in favor of Authenticity. Maybe I should rephrase that. I want everything in my life to be Authentic. I want to only eat Authentic Food and only have Authentic Experiences. When I travel, I want to travel authentically (hot air balloon, camel, steam railway). I want to meet Authentic People (family farmers, I think, are authentic; people you meet in the Polka Barn at the Iowa State Fair; members of lost tribes; chain-smoking hairdressers named Betty). I want to think Authentic Thoughts. Actually, Authenticity baffles me. I first wrestled with the notion about ten years ago, when I was researching a book about a purported anthropological hoax. The Tasaday were “discovered” in 1971 in the southern Philippines leading an authentically Stone Age…

Watching the swifts storm St. Catherine’s Church,its lofty walls raised of brick and white stone—an unfinished basilica, earthquakesand fires beset it, the transeptand tower were never built—I thought:the swifts in their mad, haphazard, grandattack on the Gothic structure and in their whistles,shrill and coarse, utterly un-human,competing with cell ringtonesand singing blackbirds, giving their final concert,are the image of ecstasy, but not ecstasy itself,they can’t be, they don’t want to be—they aren’t John of the Cross or Catherine of Alexandriaor Catherine of Siena, they know neither fullness nor void,doubt and pursuit, despair and rapture.These swifts are of the species Apus apus,they resemble swallows but shareno kinship, they’re unableto navigate on land, they know only one thing—flight,only the endless soaring overheadthat demands a spectator both slightly soberand a little touched, they need…

A menagerie of musical performances tuned to the earth BY GINGER STRAND WE ALL KNOW how ubiquitous water is—most of the planet, most of us—yet we never tire of bonding with it. We drink it, we bathe in it, we look at it, we listen to it. What other element do we enjoy the sound of? Somehow, all this makes our relationship with water more intimate. Sound connects us to things in a way that looking doesn’t: it’s more immersive, more corporeal. Listen to something resonant enough and you can feel those little bones in your inner ear doing their dance. And listening generally takes longer than looking, because sound unfolds over time, rather than being there all at once. We can take in a landscape at a glance; we…

BY RICHARD FRANCIS Yale University Press, 2010. $30, 344 pages. AS LIVING EXPERIMENTS GO, Fruitlands probably ranks among the more ill-conceived utopian communities ever attempted. To an impartial observer, the viability of the commune in Concord, Massachusetts, was as unlikely as its failure was grand. It lasted through only seven months of 1843, from June to January, and included just fourteen people; their diet consisted only of foods which would not give up their life force (i.e. are replenished on trees and vines), though they didn’t in fact have many fruit trees on their eleven acres. They lived off the land, though they had little farming experience and forbade animal labor or fertilizer. They aspired to celibacy, though they had five children among them. They possessed a vast library but…

BY KAREN RUSSELL Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. $24.95, 316 pages. FLORIDA IS A PLACE of dualities: swift, sprawling development and vast, swampy wilderness. Cosmopolitan, multicultural cities and isolated rural communities. Pristine, soft beaches and harsh, uninhabitable jungles. One finds in these stark dualities the sort of surreal, profound tensions that make for unforgettable epic stories. Karen Russell’s remarkable, lush debut novel, Swamplandia!, is this kind of epic, lushly imagined and gorgeous, with a thrilling plotline at its core and a socially aware but never ham-handed message in its fist. Much of Swamplandia! comes through the voice of twelve-year-old Ava Bigtree, who becomes the emotional core of the Bigtree family after the death of her mother, a famed alligator wrestler and star of the family-owned tourist attraction, Swamplandia! Despite the steadfast…

ORION'S SPRING CHALLENGE CAMPAIGN Help Orion flourish this spring: make a donation between Earth Day and Memorial Day, 2011, and your gift will be matched dollar for dollar by a group of generous Orion donors. Go to orionmagazine.org/springchallenge or send a check to Orion at 187 Main Street, Great Barrington, MA 01230. Thank you! A CONVERSATION WITH DERRICK JENSEN Join regular Orion columnist Derrick Jensen for a live discussion about his recent columns, including the one in this issue (pages 12–13) on May 17th at 7 p.m. (EST). The event is free but registration is required. Find out more and register at orionmagazine.org/news. Moderated by Orion staff. TEACHING, SERVICE, AND SUSTAINABILITY Join Orion, Shelburne Farms, and Community Works Institute for the Institute on Service-Learning, a powerful learning experience for anyone…

Yes, I agree with Janisse Ray (“Track Back,” January/February 2011) that train travel is a wonderful alternative—one that I enjoyed as a kid, and as an adult in Europe and Alaska. But for many of us living in the western United States, it is simply not an option. To board a train to anywhere, I would first have to fly, bus, or drive about three hundred miles to the nearest train station in Salt Lake City, Utah. From there, my choices of destination are severely limited. That makes train travel here a hobby, rather than a practical alternative form of transportation. LINDA PAULBoise, Idaho Janisse Ray’s piece is beautiful. I’ve always been drawn to the lyricism in her writing, and, once again, she has pulled me in in such a…

THE PAINTINGS PRESENTED here are inspired by intriguing cultural artifacts such as carved reliquary figures, or the “cabinets of curiosities” created by Enlightenment-era collectors and amateur naturalists. These curiosity cabinets, where fragments of nature (coral, minerals, taxidermy, and the like) were lovingly and often fetishistically contained and displayed, seem to encapsulate many of the heady and contradictory impulses that define our relationship to the natural world. The wooden “cabinets” in my paintings typically represent a single tree species and are filled or surrounded with other species that rely on the tree (or the ecosystem where it grows) for their survival. We humans are accustomed to viewing wood as a product. (When I say the word mahogany, do you think of a tree in the rainforest? Or lumber? Or only furniture?)…

BY WES JACKSON Counterpoint, 2010. $26, 272 pages. CARBON IS THE JUICE that gives the jump to all creatures great and small. From bacteria in a petri dish to you and me, says Wes Jackson in Consulting the Genius of the Place, all lifeforms operate under the 3.45-billion-year-old imperative: get carbon or die. Our own hunt for carbon, whether it’s feeding our bodies or fueling our machines, has unleashed no end of troubles. Except for hunter-gatherers, Jackson believes all human civilizations are inherently extractive. Like those bacteria in a petri dish, we will keep gobbling and expanding until the cheap carbon runs out. Jackson is not calling for a return to loincloths and spear chucking, but there is one human activity that he believes has the potential to keep us…

BY JOHN VAILLANT Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. $26.95, 329 pages. JOHN VAI LLANT’S TALE of a beast that methodically stalked, killed, and devoured a post-perestroika poacher in the southeast corner of Russia makes it clear why William Blake’s most widely anthologized poems pit God’s lamb not against a lion, but a tiger. Vaillant’s intimate portrait of this animal is one part deftly delivered, seamlessly amalgamated journalism to two parts brutally beautiful prose and storytelling prowess—and it renders in our imaginations a creature so calculatingly cunning (at the home of one victim, the big cat drags a mattress outside and lounges on it while waiting for its next victim to return home), and so powerful, it can take down the Russian brown bear, cousin to North America’s grizzly. It is credit…