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My Latest Literary Obsession: Bring on the Bard

I’m flying high in the arms of caffeine. I’ve been avoiding coffee because my gut has been twisted, but this morning I was feeling the urge. Green tea is nice, but I like that full on blitz, frantic fingers on keyboard, that only a strong cup of coffee or two can deliver. Bang. There it is.

I’m smitten with the Uncited podcast. The two women behind it, young, goofy, at times misdirected, often spot-on, are a hoot, and it’s interesting to hear their takes on works I view through a much older lens. I recently picked up a recommendation from them. I was looking for something akin to Borne, a bonbon book easy to devour but still packed with literary calories to stay the guilt (the so-many-books-out-there-why-am-I-wasting-my-time-on-this-rubbish guilt). Their pick, Station 11, is filling the bill so far. It opens in the fourth act of Shakespeare’s Lear and then rolls briskly into an end-of-the-world pandemic story, hitting all my major buttons. I’ve obsessed about end-of-the world stories since I was a wee Yinzer, probably from the time I first saw Omega Man, Charlton Heston at his defiant sci-fi finest (fuck all that Bible shit; Heston’s greatest work was filled with deserted streets and apocalyptic visions that put Revelation to shame … Omega Man, Soylent Green, Planet of the Apes). Station 11 is off to a fine start. I actually had to force myself to put it down on this 19-degree morning, waiting for the wood stove to do its thing, flipping pages on my Kindle in rapid succession and envisioning a day lost in a book, something I don’t indulge with nearly enough frequency these days and that I’m still not convinced I’ll manage today, having closed Kindle to junk surf (check Twitter, review Reddit, make sure the social presence for the nonprofit I work for is copacetic, check email — why the fuck is Google claiming the business page for one of said nonprofit’s subsidiaries in being put in some sort of limbo because of some unspecified problem on said business page?). Then I jumped into this moment. I’ve missed only one day in the 30 that have passed since I started doing these daily exercises at the behest of Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. It’s been transformative, from a writing and psycological perspective, and I have been meaning to send her some sort of communication saying thanks for that. She advocates a Zen approach to writing, just pounding your thoughts into the computer (well, not computer, actually, since she published Bones in the 1980s and seemed a tad ambivalent about even typewriters at that point). This has helped me turn it into a system as I follow her guidance to begin a writing exercise each day with the words “This Moment” and then dash off into whatever I’m obsessing about in that instance. I’ve produced a few things I’m quite proud of, though they constitute a microscopic percentage of the 31,000+ words I’ve churned out in the process (yes, my monkey mind can’t stop from making it a bit of a competition … how many total words, how many consecutive days … ). But creature of habit that I am, I sit here in the predawn Ohio morning, candles lit, Brian Harnetty’s amazing Shawnee, Ohio, playing low enough through the Sonos system to keep my mind rooted in Appalachian Ohio while I let my consciousness (no, not false class consciousness, that’s an entirely different suffering of the benz) drift from Pittsburgh to Albuquerque to Tennessee, to forests, to flying squirrels, to the Globe Theater, to all points along the timeline of my increasingly fading memories. Why the Globe this morning? Shakespeare is on my mind this moment. During the pandemic, I’ve been devouring plays on a pay-per-view basis, phenomenal theater that rivals the works I was privileged to see live at the Folger and the Shakespeare Theater Company in D.C., which recently produced Patrick Page’s incredible All the Devils are Here monologue/meditation on the Bard’s villains that I watched last night and finished with a standing ovation when it concluded. Brilliant. Simply brilliant. Page traces the Bard’s bad guys throughout the plays, from the stereotype-steeped Moor in Titus Andronicus to the more complex, nuanced villains of his later plays. It got me thinking. I’ve been looking for my Big Book of 2021, the whale of a work that I try to consume and get my head around each year. In the past, I’ve tackled Ulysses, Infinite Jest, Gravity’s Rainbow, In Search of Lost Time, Don Quixote … why not the Bard this year? So my new obsession is born, thanks in part to that transcendent moment watching Page shift from one villain to another, especially during his discussion of what, exactly constitutes a sociopath in a discussion of Iago’s dastardly deeds in Othello. Page reads the traits of a sociopath, then makes a connection of said traits to a whinging orange sociopath more than four centuries removed from Shakespeare’s Iago. So during this morning’s junk surfing, mentioned a few hundred words earlier in this predawn diatribe, I subscribed to the subreddit for Shakespeare, where I intend to seek guidance on sources of insight to aid my efforts to plow through Shakespeare’s plays this year. I read the sonnets a few years ago to the sound of howler monkeys awakening in the jungle dawn cacophony of Costa Rica. It’s time to dive back into Shakespeare, steeped in memories of my undergrad work (a key reason, no doubt, that I’m smitten with the Uncited  pod — Amy and Chantelle’s undergrad-inspired rambling about the literary works they studied in school, reflecting on a golden era in their literary lives, much as do I, though my glance backward extends decades while theirs covers only a handful of years. A vision comes to mind of my battered-brown Riverside Shakespeare, purchased used in 1984, spine on the verge of breaking, pages grimy from the paws of countless previous owners, margin notes so cryptic I don’t know how the original notetaker understood them. I wonder what happened to it. Probably disintegrated somewhere during my cross-country travels. Dr. Charles Glendinning’s voice is next, a bit posh, pontificating on the plays, putting them in context, explaining the philosophy and history that infused them so that even when I had spent the previous week drinking and drugging, neglecting to read the assignment, I still emerged with key insights that remain with me 37 years removed.

This same professor gave us the best academic advice I’ve ever received as he patted us on the ass and sent us forth into the world at the close of our senior year: “If you come out of here thinking you know a lot, we’ve failed you utterly. But if you come out realizing how little you know, how much more there is to master, then we’ve given you a good start.”

Bring on the Bard.

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Of Walking In Ice … from Berlin to Paris via Athens (Ohio)

I’m wading through a dreary winter rain, bound for Paris with Werner Herzog. Today dripped into existence more than dawned. From the cabin window, I watch water course through the diamond-patterned bark of a nearby ash that’s slowly succumbing to boring insects. More distant trees are a jumble of twigs floating in a cloud crowning invisible Peach Ridge Road.

Through the fog I hear Herzog’s voice, that iconic, unemotional German-accented English, while I read Of Walking In Ice: Munich-Paris, 23 November-14 December 1974. He was hiking toward the winter solstice 46 years ago, days growing shorter, world growing colder, while this morning I’m on the other side of the darkness, perched on the last day of February after a brutal cold spell, welcoming warmer temperatures and longer days while sodden with the knowledge that winter likely isn’t done with us. I picked this book up for two reasons: (1) It was highly recommended on the Backlisted literary podcast, which I’ve become a big fan of; and (2) I’ve been devouring nature books since feasting on Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek a few years ago. And there’s a third reason: (3) I love Herzog’s films, those strange mixtures of fact and fiction hybridized into an alternative reality at once recognizable and completely foreign. Whether he’s slogging through the Amazon jungle with a bat-shit leading man or slicing and dicing the video testimony of a nature nut who became grizzly food, his films never fail to leave me deeply affected as they bubble up in dreams and random thoughts for the next several days or even weeks afterward.

Of Walking In Ice is a nature book, sort of. It’s also a pilgrimage that he embarks on in the belief that his ailing mentor, Lotte Eisner, will not, in fact cannot, die until he arrives by her bedside in Paris and grants her permission to do so. It’s vintage Herzog in that regard.

I said that this must not be, not at this time, German cinema could not do without her now, we would not permit her death. I took a jacket, a compass, and a duffel bag with the necessities. My boots were so solid and new that I had confidence in them. I set off on the most direct route to Paris, in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot. Besides, I wanted to be alone with myself.

His ambling meditations pull you along, pull you in, refuse to let you come to solid answers about the veracity of what’s being reported. He breaks into houses along the way, seeking refuge for the night. Is this metaphor? Is he really shoving open dilapidated doors, hoping no one is home? Or is this just his forced entry into some small village’s consciousness as he plods from Munich to Paris. Imagine, coming home to a soggy German filmmaker dripping all over your threadbare carpet …

And it is a nature book in its way, paced by diesel fumes and lumbering trucks, populated by ravens, jackdaws, crows, sparrows, livestock, vagabond dogs. Wild nature is kept at a distance. The forest appears far off, on the horizon, but he doesn’t enter it. Not physically. It’s more of a mental construct, a preserve where his mind is free to range and rage in reaction to his current environs.

When I looked out the window, a raven was sitting with his head bowed in the rain and didn’t move. Much later he was still sitting there, motionless and freezing and lonely and still wrapped in his raven’s thoughts. A brotherly feeling flashed through me and loneliness filled my breast.

In this Appalachian winter rain, I find a like mind, 46 years removed. I struggled with Walking in Ice initially, trying to get into the flow as it bobs and weaves while walking through the ice and rain. Once I realize it mirrors the way I think while hiking, I fall in step. The rapid bursts of non sequiturs, the fragments and fleeting thoughts. It is sometimes sublime, sometimes laugh-out-loud hilarious, as when he starts obsessing about the words “millet” and “lusty,” convinced he never could find a sentence that would accommodate both. Then he shoots off in another direction before landing the following punchline several sentences later:

“My output of sweat is prodigious, as I march lustily thinking of millet.”

Bang. There it is.

The conclusion is incredible, a warm embrace of Lotte Eisner’s impact on German cinema and acknowledgement that this movement is now ready to fly under its own power, carrying forward a fledgling rebirth of a tradition that had been ripped apart by Germany’s Nazi era. Eisner, in fact, lived several more years after Herzog’s arrival at her bedside in Paris, and the book provides the text of a speech he delivered in 1982 when she posthumously received the Helmut Kāutner Prize for her contribution to German film. It’s the perfect coda.

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The Tao of the Carolina wren

A 7-degree Wednesday morning. Dawn barely broken. Sydney the Cockatoo perched atop his cage next to the black walnut breakfast table. Normally, he’d spend the night out in the Forest Room, which stays surprisingly warm despite its three walls of windows. I keep the HVAC fan running to circulate warm air from the wood stove. But on nights when it dips into the low teens or single digits, I pull Sydney into the cabin and close the hulking oak door that seals off all that glass, all that icy air.

Suddenly, a small brown blur shoots past, leaving Syd startled yet intrigued. Me too. Maybe a house sparrow who wants what the giant white bird bobbing atop his cage already has — warmth, free food.

I lose track of the little bird as I Zoom into a leadership call for work, but I’m not overly concerned. I’ve lived in homes aflutter with small birds, cockatiels, love birds. Eventually, the little invader will be captured. Or, more likely, leave the same way it entered.

As I listen to updates about our nonprofit, the bird drops down from the ceiling, using the stacked stone of the fireplace as a series of steps, a sort of avian ladder leading toward new foraging opportunities.

It lands on the hearth, not 10 feet from the ottoman where my feet rest.

Not a sparrow. A wren. A Carolina wren, soft brown feathers with white-streaked eyebrow, long thin beak for hammering at this speck, that pebble beside the cold, quiet fireplace. I feel the warmth of the wood stove radiating behind me. Clearly, the bird does, too.

Where did he come from, this Zen pebble tossed into my consciousness, leaving ripples of amusement and mild concern about the seal between the fireplace stone and pine ceiling of the cabin? That’s likely how the flying squirrels who have taken up residence in the crawl space between the ceiling and the roof gained access. Et tu, Carolina wren?

The tiny bird alights, flutters up toward a thin, narrow skylight that rides the sharp pitch of the ceiling, right where it meets the chimney. When I first saw that skylight, I had a WTF moment. Why would someone put that narrow slice of sky there, between pine and stone. But when the sun bursts through on bright mornings, the stacked stones glow and ripple. That’s why. And the Carolina wren finds a tight gap between stone and skylight, disappearing from sight.

Problem solved. It escaped the same way it gained entry, presumably. Mental note to point out that gap to the contractor I’m bringing in to help me critter-proof the cabin. I Zoom back to where I belong, focused on work, until nature calls.

I turn off my video. Make sure I’m on mute, Rise to use the bathroom, just steps from the fireplace, and while I’m standing there, watching green tea that’s now urine splatter, I hear a non-liquid sound.

Twaaang. Alarmed at first. I check the wall heater behind me. Did it just cry out? Or did it come from back in the cabin? It’s not the notification tone of an inbound Tweet. More acoustic, and I look at my Yamaha guitar, resting in the corner between the fireplace and the entry to the bathroom. Clearly a suspect. But, how? What? And as I look closer I see a tiny pebble on the bridge of the guitar, having landed there after it plummeted from above, bounced off the low E string, and came to rest.

It was a Tweet, Sorta. A message from the little avian up in that crevice above the fireplace. All day long, the wren goes back and forth, hopping to the ground, foraging, gobbling a dead stink bug at one point ( a bird after my heart; why can’t the fucking cockatoo do that?). I’m at peace with this. I’m reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s incredible translation of the Tao Te Ching. I am one with this universe. I am water, flowing around this distraction, one with it.

Water hell. I am bird seed. I grab some and put it on the hearth, here and there, for the next time the wren appears. I start thinking, hey, I have plenty of room. Eat those stink bugs and we can live in harmony. But my Monkey Mind intervenes. It could be carrying some sickness that would infect Syd. I find droppings along the mantle. Time for an eviction. But a gentle boot out the door is in order.

With sundown impending, the Carolina wren re-emerges, lands directly next to the seed, and starts hammering hard at the safflower and sunflower, woodpecker like, not the nibbling I expected from so small a creature. It then wanders past the guitar and toward … the bathroom.

Opportunity knocks. And I quietly rise and close the door, trapping the tiny bird in the wee windowless bathroom. I hear it ricocheting around in there, panicked, trying to find a way out of the darkness. I grab a soft felt blanket and slip inside, pulling the door quickly closed, then flick on the light. After a few moments of doing a claustrophobic Benny Hill routine, I emerge from the bathroom, gently cradling the tiny bird in the blanket, and hustle it through the cabin, through the back room and out the door, where I gingerly unfurl the blanket and send it soaring toward the black walnut trees that border the utility cut between the cabin and the road.

I reflect, feeling a bit guilty about evicting the tiny creature into what will be another viciously cold night. But I take solace in the Tao.

Heaven and earth aren’t humane
To them the ten thousand things
are straw dogs


The universe is determined to test me, flinging Carolina wrens at my attempts to find the Tao. Thursday and Friday dawn much like Wednesday. Frigid. Trapped in close quarters with an antsy cockatoo. Work tasks waiting to be ticked off my checklist.

And, of course, the Carolina wren. Or wrens? Again. And Again. And again.

A scratching above me, somewhere up near the top of the chimney, maybe, hopefully, outside the east-facing window that overlooks the woodshed and its dwindling contents.

I go quiet. Silence the chattering keyboard. I hear the rustling of a tiny bird, foraging once more just yards away, a counterpoint to the ticks and clicks of the warming wood stove. The scene becomes Keystone Cops comical. At least from the cockatoo’s perspective as he watches me walk calmly behind the tiny brown blur as it hops here, scurries there, hiding under the couch, under the table, under the chaise lounge where I consume podcasts at the end of each day.

I catch and release the bird or birds five times over two days, mildly irked, then amused, Then irked again, even to the point where, in a fit of pique on Friday, I consider dashing its brains out rather than releasing it again.

I calm down. I come up with a plan to determine if this is some vast avian conspiracy or simply a single bird prone to recidivism. Friday’s fourth and final catch does not include a release. It ends in a cardboard Amazon box, where I deposit the wren and the dishtowel used to subdue it. This is where it will spend the night. The back room isn’t heated, but it doesn’t freeze. The bird should be fine. And in the morning, I’ll sit in my usual spot, watching the sun rise, waiting to see if a Carolina wren drops into my consciousness.

And it doesn’t. Saturday dawns cold. Again. I hear birdsong outside — nearby, but clearly outside. No Carolina wren in my cabin. I go to the back room, scoop up the box without opening it (I’m not risking another escape) and put it in my truck, already warmed up and ready to conquer the double-black-diamond ski slope I call a driveway. Thanks to the 4 wheel drive low setting, I reach Peach Ridge Road and head south, toward Athens, toward a grocery run at Seaman’s, toward a little pull off along the way where I can free this guy and be shed of him.

Visions of grateful creatures returned to the wild dance in my head as I pull the box out of the truck, crunch crunch crunch a few feet away through ice crusted snow, and open it. Inside, a crumpled dishtowel. A dead Carolina wren, its feet curled in tiny fists. So much for the feel-good moment of the snowbound winter …

The ten thousand things arise together;
In their arising is their return.


It’s Saturday. Another 7 degree morning. I’m watching the candles flicker on the mantel as the sun slowly creeps into my consciousness, reflected through the caffeine prism that is my mind. It was a beautiful, icy night. A first quarter moon poured through my bedroom window in the loft, throwing the snow-covered forest into soft white contrast to the western sky.

Birdsong ignites outside the cabin. Today will be kissed with sunshine. No sign of intruders (though the flying squirrels were up and about a few hours ago, dancing in the moonlight.)

I’m still processing this. I was crestfallen to realize the bird paid for its trespasses with its life. I wonder what, exactly, killed it, settling on the likelihood that the stress from Friday’s antics were just too much for its tiny, exhausted heart. During my morning reading of the Tao I look for some answer. But it’s another poet, more contemporary, who brings it into focus.

(Me up at does)
e.e. cummings

Me up at does

out of the floor
quietly Stare

a poisoned mouse

still who alive

is asking What
have i done that

You wouldn’t have