Bugs 2: Adventures in Distributive Agency

In How Forests Think, Eduardo Kohn describes the dream of a Runa woman in the Ecuadorian rainforest, a dream of an encounter with a deer.  The next day, this dream played out in a hunting scene (as she expected), in which the woman and one doe became aware of each other, while the buck and her husband (with the gun) remained oblivious.  Here, Kohn points to a situation in which "agency becomes distributed over different selves," while "some of these selves can lose agency in the process" (116-7).  He adds, that "Under certain circumstances, we are all forced to recognize the other kinds of minds, persona, or selves that inhabit the cosmos"; further, "selves must recognize the soul-stuff of other selves in order to interact with them" (117).  

Eduardo Kohn, "Thinking with a Forest's Thoughts"

I'll have some trouble, eventually, elsewhere, with the term "self," but here, lets pair Kohn with Donna Haraway, who in When Species Meet uses the terms "instrumental relations" and, better, "knot" (69-70), to describe a similar process of agency.  She labels this "a ramifying tapestry of shared being/becoming among critters (including humans)" who engage in "ontologically multiple instrumental relationships...in an irreducible world of embodied and lived partial differences" (72).  I'm taking this shamefully out of context, but well, go read her book for yourself if you want the straight story.

I'm here to tell you one of the comic sagas of my recent life. Comic, in that there are painful pratfalls, weird critters across scales of many orders of difference, unlikely associations, and more than a few swell dogs.  So, let's begin, in medias res, for this mock epic.  It's last Monday, and I'm ready to join Soren at the Berg that afternoon to talk about Jamie Lorimer's great essay, "Multinatural geographies for the Anthropocene" (2012), and I get an email from Soren saying he's "caught a little bit of a stomach bug."  (See, this is Bugs 2!).  Suddenly, the time-space of my whole afternoon opens up, and there are choices--go to the Berg anyway, drink by myself, work on the silly blog...or, call Ann, and see if she wants to go to McGinty's, where I noticed that have a new local blackberry cider, which I think she'll like (she hates 95% of the world's beer, as we've verified in country after country, a deep character flaw, and more grievous, she also dislikes red wine, and Ann, after all, had refused McGinty's last week, claiming she had life-stuff to do)...or, go to the gym, be responsible working off my encroaching belly-beer-fat...or, go to Wal-mart for the goldfish, and/or, work on projects at home.  For no clear, nor, as it turns out, fortunate reason, I chose the not-drinking options, and instead, did all the rest. Moderation is not my strong suit.  How did Blake say it?  "You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough," and "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." Words to live by, and suffer by.  No clue I could take from the context, that these lines are from Blake's Proverbs of Hell.

So, off to the gym, for a newly-intense back and bicep and ab workout.  Newly, because some of these exercises I hadn't done for 8 or 9 months, last September having fallen from a top step, a rain-wet step, off-balance with a heavy backpack, and the new, bouncy, Great Pyrenees puppy running between my legs, helping me to slam hard and injure my shoulder.  Not having time, I hadn't gone to the doctor till, well, this June, and verified some rotator cuff damage.  And that had thrown off the gym visits quite a bit. Anyway, Monday, with my new meds, feeling grand, with no other obligations, I got in a good, thorough workout.  

Then to Wal-mart for the goldfish.  And the male betta.

Why suddenly fish, and why would they matter?  It's summer.  Oh. That's not enough link?  It's summer, and there are mosquitoes. Yes, you say, get on with it.  Mosquitoes, which breed in all the rainwater I harvest at home. 

For dogs, for tomatoes, for washing my hands outside, all that stuff. And not just in buckets set out under the sky, but from the torrents off the broken gutter or the front, torn-off porch edge. I have one of those plastic, toddler pools full of rainwater.  Which all the critters use, which I keep filled from buckets.  And which the mosquitoes love.  There is, finally this year, a frog in there, but still a lot of wriggly larvae as well.  So, the fish need to live in the pool and eat the larvae, so that the mosquitoes don't as much eat me. 

How does this get up to the "painful pratfall" promised above?  I'm getting there, in my usual direct fashion.  Because Cybele, the younger puppy, Golden Retriever,

loves to jump in any water at all, scummy pond, mud-broth ditch, hopeful puddle, and that rainwater pool, I needed to move a cement cinder block from the fence bottom into the pool, so the fish would have some sturdy shelter from the furry apocalypse splashing in....Ok, and in looking at the fence in the front, I'd found a place where the dogs had been pushing out under the fence, evidenced by tufts of gold fur caught in the chainlink edges in the warped bottom edge....So (you seem to need an awful lot of explanation, for things so obvious), I went to that scrap-pile I'd noticed by the field of day lilies, near the dead-end sidewalk, and "harvested" a number of large chunks of concrete to use to block up the dogs' nights out.

And, since it has been raining non-stop for weeks, in a way that would have played right into Nicholaus' scam in The Miller's Tale (sure, my first thought goes to Chaucer!), I also, soberly, decided to move those paving stones up to some muddy spots in the path at home, juggling them back and forth as the dogs knock against my legs, in endless affection.  

And since it was still in the 90s, temp and humidity, that Missouri special combo, I eventually decided to go to D & D for a beer, but really for the AC, which I consider eco-sinful for individuals, but ok in public settings, there to work a bit online as the apologetic academic outsider at a redneck country bar, take some swell notes, work on that book of flash-fiction-quantum/object-ontology tales, blog-brainstorming on technology and on course-proposals for Scotland study abroad next year, meditations of rural identity formation, all that normal stuff.  Of course, with me not blending in, laptop and legal pad at the bar, a former Columbia College teacher recognized me, and we wound up talking, and it turns out he has a travel agency, and could probably set up our study abroad trips without those mega-companies, who now charge at least 4000$ for any trip, anywhere.  "Those companies, they just rape you," I believe he said.  A new contact, new options, new ideas. All good.  And I stayed long enough, that I realized I needed a photo of a Prairie Fire, for the integrity of this blog, the curiously named Geography102b, and so...I stayed longer than I intended, and didn't really sleep all that well, something of a trend lately.

Tuesday.  This is Act III, if we're following Shakespeare's structure for crowd-pleasing comedy (the subject of my online students' research paper this week), up for slow breakfast, watched Perry Mason (you can get whole episodes on YouTube!), walked the dogs, headed to the Jeep with my backpack, and crunch.  There in the road, suddenly I couldn't hold the backpack, and couldn't stand up.  Back pain, that switch where you don't see outward, just monitor the internal system, and I sank to the ground.  Huh, that's strange, I thought, between cries of pain, which only the ditch-weeds noticed.  Got to the Jeep, went to town for coffee, the rational course of action, though I parked on Cherry Street instead of in my regular parking garage, to save 2 blocks of walking (I was suspicious of this new development) and started off for Lakota, with just my journal and laptop and a few folders.  A little crash on the corner, an agonizing few moments leaning on a trash bin, then started across the street.  I collapsed in the middle of 10th Street, and the nearby homeless guy on the bike started yelling, "Call 9-1-1," and the lady in the car at the red light looked ready to do that, as well as relieved that I wasn't directly in front of her, and she had the option to drive away with the light change, but I called out, "no, just my back!"  Just.  Hmm...  

Got across the street and managed to sit on that embankment, still there because the apartment construction mania had hit a metaphoric brick wall (real ones they demolish, all over town) in that this was a historic landmark, where Mark Twain had once spent the night.  Thanks, Mark!  20 minutes breathing, accompanied by that same bike-guy, who never quite got the back part, and kept telling me about his lower-leg brace, and about the woman who paid him 20$ for sex, and how he smelled later, not recognizing that the beer smell was about all he put off, and eventually, I said I needed to get moving.  

And I did.  Half a block farther, and I collapsed on the same embankment, but in shade.  There by that vandalized No Parking sign along the alley.  And couldn't walk for 30 minutes.  But 9-1-1 seemed too dramatic and expensive an option, and having a phone even that no one will answer is a great solace, so I eventually got to Lakota, had some swell coffee, and reached Ann after her math class, and she came to rescue me.  Though I collapsed again in Lakota, and two guys had to semi-carry me to Ann's car.  

Act IV, probably--she persuaded me that just going to school to teach my class, still 4 hours away, wasn't the best idea, and we went toward Urgent Care.  Which is no longer on Hitt Street, the parking valet there telling us it is on South Providence, across from Rock Bridge High School.  Good to know.  There, Ann went in and got a wheelchair, and so, 

I spent my first afternoon in a wheelchair.  Nothing really happened at Urgent Care, except for the X-ray, and I decided not to think about the uncomfortable moment taking off my pants to keep the zipper from making X-ray art, the screaming getting on the table, and a long, long wait, till the doctor came in and told me to just take more of the muscle relaxants I already had for my shoulder.

Alas, Ann didn't get to go home and mow her lawn.  She did wheel me back to her car, got me to my Jeep (oh, no problem driving a stick shift, only trying to get my legs up into the Jeep without the screaming drawing too much public scrutiny.  Road safety?  Pffft!), and though I'd had Ann stop and refill the meter before we left for Urgent Care, I still got a parking ticket... Sigh.  Then to the better classroom Ann arranged on the phone, where I could pull up only a 20-foot stagger away, and avoid the stairs.  Class went fine, if not quite without a drug and pain haze, and appropriately, we read "Ode to a Nightingale," which I translated into Missouri-speak, and the students were nice, and semi-carried me back to the Jeep.  A pleasant drive home, then 20 minutes making the 2 minute walk from the driveway to the house, urging the dogs to not be quite so happy to see me.  Dogs are necessary, but not good nurses. 

And the rest is just a drug-induced, foggy dream, 30 hours of sleep, dogs deciding they needed to walk themselves, making a new hole in the backyard fence, my grim trip to town Thursday to teach class, which fortunately was mostly just showing the already-in-the-syllabus movie, The Importance of Being Ernest, which contains gems of Wilde-wisdom, such as:

Lady Bracknell: I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delecate, exotic fruit. Touch it, and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did it would prove a serious threat to the upper classes, and probably lead ot acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.    (Much more at imdb...)

It's Sunday again, I've patched the new exit point in the back fence twice, managed to daylight walk the dogs a bit, once with the raccoon stick as a staff (very Gandalf in the evening light), and I can more or less walk without planning every step.  All a happy ending, though the doctor tomorrow morning will probably be stern with me, and feel like he needs to do some sort of test.  Eh.  I have a lot of pills left.

But back to that academic framework we started with, so many thousands of words above--distributed agency.  Not at all, who should I blame, but looking at the ways different agencies asserted themselves.  Family and work pulled Ann into their knots on Monday, and those "bugs," this virus or that, incorporated Soren into their living realm.  My own excesses played in, yes, linked to demands from my imagined audience that I not lapse into late-middle-aged fat, and body urges to claim a lost potency.  Maya, the Great Pyrenees, helped me injury myself last fall in her enthusiasm for the outside.  More my exuberance coming home drunk the week before, lifting the now 120-pound ball of white fluff and spinning her around the muddy yard.  Happy dance.  Buckets of rainwater, full of mosquito-larvae, living their lives, that needed to be lifted off the porch and dumped in the pool, to feed the frog, to feed the fish.  And there's the dogs, needing me to keep patching one fence after another, although we were going on three walks everyday already.  The rain and flagstones, chunks of concrete, mosquitoes and fish and buckets and that cinder block, ambitious sex last week, the gym, job stress, bad sleep...

Cause?  Effect?  That doesn't seem quite the right mode, nor does reducing all this to medical diagnosis.  So many agents playing their hands, and fins, and wings, and paws.  Such a detailed tapestry that wove itself into the strained fibers of my back.

later, bob

Bugs

I got this message from Soren last week:  "I seem to have caught a little bit of a stomach bug [that my kid] had. I'm feeling better, and I'm still up for meeting today, but wanted to let you know. Also, will probably be having something other than suds to drink! Anyway, I don't think I'm contagious at all, but like I said, wanted to let you know. It's what we do here in the 'burbs.'"  Alas, later on, he wrote to cancel, his public-energy spent in Geography 1100, the summer version of Regions and Nations of the World 1 (someday, we should chat about that class...).

But this meant that my weekly moment of intellectual engagement had crashed. Teaching doesn't count, not only because we're slumping into the Victorian realm, leaving behind Keats and Romantic fellow travelers--but because there in class, I have to guide the discussion, and not say outrageous things, or at least make sure students don't write them down.  Monday, though, in that early-morning-window of early-caffeine-jacking-into my deprived (no, not depraved) biochemistry, I instantly knew Soren had given me something to investigate.

First, there are the remedies that automatically come to mind. True, beer doesn't seem the ideal treatment for a virus, nor, I think wine. For sore throat or congestion, go with a Prairie Fire, a process which you can visualize this way:

Here's someone's not-for-the-cure response:

  
(and I felt the need to generate my own authentic images, so I ordered one at D&D explicitly to take a picture...

 

But sadly, in the excitement, I forgot to photo the first one, and had to order a second, which appears happily above.  The price of research...).

Or for just ordinary out of sorts, low energy, lethargy, probably this combo which Matt imported from Denver for us, the tequila shot with powered cinnamon and orange:

And there're remedies like 4 weeks of beer and yogurt, which I found successful in those days without health insurance, after swimming in the Amazon, and getting some never-known bacteria or parasite.  Quite effective.  

Beyond remedies, though, Soren offered that virus/micro-critter-sharing is "what we do here in the 'burbs.'"  I have had one student out a couple weeks ago with something that sounded like that stomach affliction, so I looked in the official media for local epidemics.  Found a report of "early flu," from December 16, 2014, a report on fatal deer illness from this March, and a February report, "Shigella Outbreak in Columbia/Boone County, Missouri," in which we're informed that this is caused by a feces-related bacteria.  Cool.

Yet all of these, and the absence of more reports, given how often something "goes around," tells me that we miss out on a whole layer of reality, that realm of bacteria, viruses, and invisible parasites.  Sure, we hear plenty about recent pandemics and their apocalyptic threat, but this misses the hourly lives of our little buddies, how they jump from one human to another, their colloquiums on strategic mutation, their treaties with human cells, their declarations of war.  For any of this to reach the official media, one consistent strain would have to expand to bloated proportions, sort of like the human population, which continues to blossom like algae in an increasing fetid pond. Most of our encounters with the invisible world are tiny events, local or micro-local, ever-shifting, perhaps county-wide, perhaps networked through day-care, or an event in the 'burbs.

To really see these, we'd need to crowdsource, to gather reports, symptoms, anecdotes, draw lines of contact...  Oh, crowdsourcing-- visualize it like this-- 

For Columbia, population about 100k, maybe 100 'spotters'?  200? For Boone County, about 170k--maybe 400, spread out in all the little human pockets?

A goal?  Maybe to see a different reality.  Try Googling "ontology of bacteria."  That's not what I'm going for.  More a sense of different states of being, of a very different agency--of lifeforms that, after all, numerically dominate this planet.

The whole planet, though, well, we've never been good at thinking in those terms.  Wouldn't it be fun to begin to see, to map, just some of what lives right here in Boone County?  What kind of map could do justice to the types, the numbers, the absurdly fast leaps, the temporal shifts?  Even the idea of what a map is would collapse.

later, bob

Storm-porn and the Technology of Emotion

There were so many places to start this post.  Seems like any one, and none, would quite work. Thought about doing the lawn-mower tease:  think about all the times you've mowed the lawn, push or riding. Whether for pride or allowance or sheer habit. The hot sun, the sometimes breeze, the smell of the cut grass, the smell of the dirty-engine exhaust, the daydreaming, that oops! when you run over the new tulips, those pictures in your head of what the swath of green is 'sposed to look like, maybe the police order that keeps your lawn under 4" tall, maybe the neighbors' dandelions which parachute in like the communists in Red Dawn...all that.  File all those images away, and--but nah, didn't want to start with that tease.  Forget the lawn.

Instead, look at this photo I just took, a ways down my road, walking the dogs about midnight, the moon already up and down and long gone.  What's wrong with this picture?

Oh, another trick.  Probably nothing wrong exactly.  Just that with my cell phone camera, I can't take a picture of that host of fireflies swirling like an elfin city through the elder oaks and cottonwoods there by the creek.  Not even a mini-flash recorded, of the hundreds of dis-junct, patterned flashes every instance.  So no still photo. And I can't give you that in a poem (I've done the poetry, but nobody read poetry).  And I haven't, for years, been able to interest my film friends into capturing scenes like this, creating our own film bank. (I'm determined to get our film group, Dark City, back into production this summer.  I started on a Busch Light-induced script last night.)  And without any of those mediations, those technologies, I can't even begin to give you the simple wonder of walking through this every night.

The mediations are what we need to figure out.  At AAG this spring in Chicago, at this session, "Alien Phenomenology--Sounding the Thermal,"

the main presenter, I think Kevin McHugh (his son the one in NY, he said), gave us demonstrations of altered media, using [sound], and thermal imaging.  The effect and purpose were mostly to offer us a dislocation of our "normal" (that is, habitual, conditioned) sense of  being.  A lot of the images looked a bit like these bits from Predator (I linked this because I know some film-challenged folks, the film-equivalent of me and music--scary!):

or on this aslant look at sports .

More interesting, McHugh was the first I heard at this conference to talk, at least in passing, about OOO (and here's a nice piece on 'how to explain OOO to your non-OOO friends').  But not so strangely, Wikipedia is always the best at the basic run-down.  (Soren and I have spent a good deal of time this spring working through Graham Harman 

                                    

     

                  "Graham Harman: Objects and the Arts"

and Tim Morton, both worth looking into.)  A side note--if I can find the thermal camera technology, I'm ready to start writing a few scripts that use this as a basic plot/identity device, but so far, I just get strange looks...   Maybe Mark will know.

Through all these ramblings, a key thread--what we can know, experience, feel, express, all these are limited, prevented, mediated or threaded through by various technologies.  So, is this just an alienation, as we were coached to think, back when, in lots of pop and too-serious books? [ok, I should generate a cool and critical list of these, and maybe someday, but I've had too much coffee to be that patient right now.]  Or are we working on some mind-shift?  some evolution? (cyborg, etc.) an 80-degree twist on poetry? a new ontology?

At some point, being stuck and not writing this post (which defeats the whole point, of quick and easy and not-anxious communication), I realized that I'm probably not using the term 'technology' the same way people usually do, so some more cheap beer, and I scribbled out these categories, during loud Saturday-night karaoke at the country bar ('Cos I ain't askin' nobody for nothin', / If I can't get it on my own. / If you don't like the way I'm livin', / You just leave this long-haired country boy alone"):

1.  Technology of extension.  Cars, planes, microwaves.  Laptops, light bulbs, nuclear bombs, super-villain lasers, flying saucers, gasoline, aspirin, polyester.  Hammers, broken or otherwise.  The regular stuff that shapes and is our physical presence.

2.  Technology of compulsion. Parking tickets, eminent domain, Supreme Court decisions, prisons (Foucault stuff).  Animal control. Drug laws. Dinner etiquette. Those slippery 5, 8, 3 yellow lines down the center of the road on Saturday nights.

3.  Technology of evolution.  Monocultures.  Farming.  Dolly.  All of Monsanto.  Dog-breeding.  Biological warfare.  The gods.  (N.b., not all gods are benign.)

4.  Technology of emotion.  Writing, poetry, novels. TV.  Movies. Social media.  Songs--which I think become a basis for identity in some times and places, especially country western songs in rural margins, where the songs seem to codify ethics/persona/behavior. (I'll write about that someday, when I'll have some commentary on tunes like 

  "Country Boys Can Survive," Hank Williams, Jr.

or by Little Big Town, or one of Lee Greenwood's songs.  Anyway, these technologies, which are the type I'm most interested in here.

The Saturday all this coalesced, there I was, home on a stormy night, after an afternoon of coffee, prepping for Brit Lit 2, a romp through Horace Walpole (which inspires me to go visit Strawberry Hill next May, when I'll be stuck in London), and excerpts from The Monk and bits from Ann Radcliffe, reading Aikin and Aikin's "On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror, and Sir Bertrand, a Fragment," (1773): 

A strange and unexpected event awakens the mind, and keeps it on the stretch; and where the agency of invisible beings is introduced, of "forms unseen, and mightier far than we," our imagination, darting forth, explores with rapture the new world which is laid open to its view, and rejoices in the expansion of its powers. Passion and fancy cooperating elevate the soul to its highest pitch; and the pain of terror is lost in amazement.

Hence the more wild, fanciful, and extraordinary are the circumstance of a scene of horror, the more pleasure we receive from it...

And I wind up captured by Svengoolie's presentation of The Bride of Frankenstein, back in those happy days before movie ratings, the Depression-bliss of 1935: 

There, terror was shown inside the movie, the villagers frenzied in alternate fear and outrage, though whether the original audience felt terror or our campy delight, not sure.

But what stood out that night was more the TV weather.  Oh, there was "real" weather outside:

Yes, I'd driven home through downpour.  And later, Darrell, at D&D, told me about being on a bus in town, when the call came through to "take shelter," and the buses stopped, and his bus shuffled people into a church (wind-threat, not War of the Worlds), and the power went down in places in town.  But TV weather, an incessant drone, voices that just say the same thing, live, on a hysteric loop, with no new info, only shifting, dramatic, vivid, violent graphics: 

Yes, there are real dangers, like Joplin disintegrating a few years ago... Here's the long version: 

 

And Oklahoma, frequently, is shredded by tornadoes. 

But what we get on local TV is not measured, and not, finally useful, not truthful.  It has taken on cheap sensation of pornography.  And pornography isn't harmless; per Ann Tolly, in "10 toxic side effects of pornography use," which I'll shamelessly select from, to shore up this analogy with weather coverage:

"When someone views [excessive weather-hysteria], they end up creating an intimate bond with an artificial, fake world and can actually lose the ability to bond with [the real world outside]."

Users/viewers "end up feeling emotionally empty and disconnected...," and "while pornography use [weather viewing] may result in a short term high, it eventually results in feelings of emptiness...and deep loneliness.  It ultimately creates emotional distance."

"Over time, [users'/viewers'] brain chemistry is altered and a full-fledged addiction occurs."  Further, "Sex [relation to the world] is no longer a wonderful source of connection between our deepest selves and a beloved partner; it becomes a commodity..."

And, as "an addictive substance, it creates an appetite for itself," which requires an escalation of the original thrill.  Overall, such encounters "will magnify each emotional wound from the past and cripple your ability to meet your essential emotional needs."

Here's another porn-critique that you might have fun reading in terms of weather-sensationalism:  "He's Just Not that Into Anyone."

Of course, the trouble with analogies is they only work so far, and then they miss the whole point.  I don't want to completely reject our tech-interfaces, these new faces of being.  Technology does matter in our new emotional constitutions, but weather hysteria simply alarms and misses the big picture, the many many things we should worry about, like, say, all the chemicals rushing through us, or dubious good news, such as guns finally being more deadly to us than cars.  Or the real threat, which is climate collapse, which weather-hysteria and bad media policy prevent us from seeing.  

Quick corrections?  Watch Bill McKibben's Do the Math, which is free on topdocumentaryfilms.com, or see the amazing documentary, Chasing Ice (it's on Netflix).

later, bob

The Response from Illinois

Mike

Apparently, those folks over there have bio-pirated some of our day lilies...

and from Lee, outside Chicago...

bob

The Season of Flash Flood

Seasons.  Let's think about that.  It seems appropriate, here on June 20, formally the last full day of Spring, the Summer Solstice to begin in about 20 hours.  But earth-tilt and seasons aren't quite the same thing, at least not in our imagination.  Consider:

"April showers bring May flowers."  Our friends at Wikipedia tell us of April Showers that "In one day the weather can change from springtime sunshine to winter sleet and snow. The track of these depressions can often be across Ireland and Scotland bringing bands of rain followed by heavy showers (often of hail or snow) and strong blustery winds."  They go on to say "The proverb "March winds and April showers bring forth May flowers", first recorded in 1886, or the shorter, trochaic version "April showers bring May flowers" (originally "Sweet April showers/Do spring May flowers", part of a poem recorded in 1610) are common expressions in English speaking countries." Cool.

I didn't know about the 1610 poem, so tried out that rhyme.  Didn't find 1610.  Instead, I wound up with Thomas Tusser, a poet I'd never heard of, despite his life, 1524-80, being squarely in the Elizabethan era, some of his clever sayings, like “A fool and his money are soon parted,” and his A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie (available on Amazon!), being, according to the Poetry Foundation, "thought to have been one of the most popular books of poetry during the time of Elizabeth I."

  

(Notice that this cover is 500 Points of Good Husbandry--apparently so successful, he expanded 5-fold.  I, strangely, never get requests to write more...).

     Or, we can go back a bit to this poetry:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote   

The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote, 

And bathed every veyne in swich licour, 

Of which vertu engendred is the flour; 

Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth        

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth 

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne 

Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,   

And smale fowles maken melodye, 

That slepen al the night with open ye,       

(So priketh hem nature in hir corages: 

Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, 

And palmers for to seken straunge strondes,   

To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes; 

And specially, from every shires ende        

Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende, 

The holy blisful martir for to seke, 

That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.

Translate this?  Really?  If you're reading this, you've been to college.  

It's Chaucer. 

It's Middle English.  Get over it. 

And there's this seasonal artifact, already doubtful, even back when: 

  

Well, yes.  We're headed, not for 4-part harmony, but to question that 4-part symmetry in the way we think about seasons, even when the evidence is long against it.  We certainly don't share the weather patterns of the British Isles, even if those are buried in our language habits.  But even making a few corrections in longitude and latitude, we won't find a match.  Growing up in the Bootheel, I might have been able to imagine that quartet--blazing summers, a suffocating fall, a couple months of chill and ice storms, with occasional snow, then rain and tornadoes.  Close.

But these days?  We're accelerating out of even that mismatch.  A temporary pattern of late summer drought (more west of us, true, and that part not changing for the better in the next few decades), which overlaps with the reign of tornadoes, an unstable season of hay fever and baseball and football, a cold snap to end the year, a false spring too early, which tricks trees into bud, a resurgent winter blast in February, March storms, two beautiful days in April, then months of mold, mosquitoes and more storms, drenching us before the cycle repeats.

Just now, we're at the tailing edge of being drenched, a time we could label 'a season of flash floods.'

There's Texas...  

This already foreshadowed in that scene in All the Pretty Horses, the movie version, not the book (which is one of Cormac McCarthy's more cheerful works), 

in which the goofy kid, Jimmy Blevins, is stripped down to his underwear, hiding from lightning in a ravine, which not long after, has a real flash flood.

John Grady Cole: What the hell are you doing?
Jimmy: Just sittin' here.
John Grady Cole: If this rain hits hard, there's gonna be a river come down through here like a train. You thought about that?
Jimmy: You ain't never been struck by lightning. You don't know what it's like.
John Grady Cole: You're gonna get drowned sittin' there.
Jimmy: Why that's all right, I ain't never been drowned before.
John Grady Cole: Well...I say no more.   (imdb quotes)

(He does better nowadays on NCIS.)

Joe and Soren recently strolled around Rock Bridge Memorial State Park , taking refuge from yet another Missouri monsoon in Devil's Icebox, and found the water gushing in.  There were survivors.

And then there's my yard, newly converted to swampland:

 

We keep getting the news reports, the governor declaring a rain-state-of-emergency,

much because crops just can't endure what this spring has to offer:

And more storms on the way:

One state ag official said that only 42% of Missouri's soybean crop has been planted yet, while a farmer let the TV crews film his soggy fields and empty barn, to show that the early haying season has pretty much collapsed.  We read about that same sort of thing in Barbara Kingsolver's novel, Flight Behavior, a book that looked at Monarch butterflies radically changing their winter survival strategies, because of global warming.  (Here's one book review; I like this novel better than a lot of the reviewers to.  Even without things blowing up.)  
   

A problem here is that what matters about flash flood just now is strictly shown in human terms--what happens to our roads, our crops, the hay in the field, occasionally the cattle, which figure only in relation to our fast food mania.  Does flash flood mean the same to the grasses on their own?  To the dragonflies?  To my dogs?

Long-term, of course, none of how we think about the seasons matters at all.  It's more the patterns and changes that we need to be aware of, and just refuse to pay attention to.  For instance, NASA's 

GRACE program has been identifying what's going on with aquifers around the world, and what happens to those will make quite a bit of difference.  That, and the way rain and drought play off against each other.  And they aren't playing that game the same way agriculture needs them to play.  The grass will grow, but might not get harvested.  The soy and corn and wheat might not make it at all, at least not on the predictable mass scale we depend on.

What I guess I could have said right off, and saved you all this time:  There are no seasons anymore, not even the false imports.  No seasons except maybe TV and sports.  There are only episodes of weather-time-event now, and despite our old habits or campy nostalgia, this won't change for quite a while.  We've entered two centuries  of human-caused chaos.

later, bob

John Grady Cole: I thought you might want your old horse back.
Lacey: Damn, bud.

Ditch Lilies

Among things flourishing in our current month of deluge are those half-hidden, out of the way, orange day lilies.  Do you notice them at all?  Or are they just part of the background, like puddles and clouds, political blah-blah-blah, and green weeds sprouting everywhere?

Occasionally, there are big clumps of them, like here on the Business Loop:

Hard to know if those are nurtured, or simply not yet "improved."

More often, these lilies are scattered along the road, in ditches, in odd little clumps.  Along North Brown Station...

  

 Here, around a country mailbox...

 Or just in the ditch...

Or in big clumps in the field, where no one is building yet...

Here, for instance, a new and unfortunate little development has a sidewalk that just goes nowhere--nowhere being a field of flowers.

In town, along Rangeline, between Bus. Loop and Wilkes (where I not only drive back and forth, but got to walk several times today, my Jeep having decided to plunge into the 260 degree + red zone)...

Odd clumps of flowers...

 

Lilies sort of forgotten or not noticed, back by the AC unit, or a garage...

  

Or in that margin between the incessantly upgraded asphalt and the tilted, cracked sidewalks, beside an electric pole.  On the strip of Vandiver I drive, the only day lilies were around an electric pole in front of an older house.  None of course around any of the car dealers or state buildings.

On South 9th, those old apartments that J-school students have long inhabited, which almost, and maybe still soon, are slated for the endless destroy-and-replace-craze Columbia is in:

 

Where these lilies are, and where they aren't might have a lot to say to us.  They aren't anywhere that hires people to keep "the grounds."  They aren't anywhere that wealthy people live.  Nor, in my quick survey, any place there are new homes.  Almost a formula:  the more groomed the lawn, the less likely day lilies will be left to bloom.

Our friend, The Missouri Department of Conservation, tells us that the Orange Day Lily is "found along roads, disturbed stream banks, railroads, fields, pastures, old cemeteries, abandoned homes, and waste places. Native of Eurasia. Old-fashioned ornamentals, day lilies were widely planted by early settlers. This plant is sterile and has escaped from cultivation coast to coast by root divisions. Today there are thousands of garden hybrids but, strangely, none of those have been reported as escaped into the wild."  That explains a bit.  The MDOC continues:  "The flowers are rich in protein and are eaten in China; they can be fried or broiled much like squash blossoms or used as a flavoring in soups. The roots can be eaten raw or cooked and are said to taste like salsify. Neither insects nor diseases bother the plant."

Now that has possibilities!  I stopped yesterday at the edge of that sidewalk to nowhere and picked a few blossoms.  Haven't tried them yet.  In salad?  Quick-fried in olive oil?  Hmm...  (Ah, the possibilities...)

But to the point--day lilies seem to have quite a bit to say about how we live right now.  Once prized by 'early settlers'--you can imagine life without the luxury of bits of color, and here, some plants that just have to be stuck in the ground and left alone, little spots of joy just at the corner of the house or beside the barn.  Today, they survive when they aren't easily in the path of mowers--in wet ditches, around mailboxes, which county road crews sometimes try to miss, in forgotten spots at the edges. Interesting is how often, at least in Columbia, they are paired with catalpha trees, a few elder trees towering, and lots of seedlings sprouting up, tolerated as weeds or shrubs, till they interfere with one of our civil projects.  (Both day lilies and catalapha trees tend to be scorned in the designer lands of Bradford pears...)

 

Wouldn't it be fun, given enough leg-power, to just inventory a few neighborhoods around here, create one of those Denis Wood maps, like in Everything Sings?  To test out what space we left, what space isn't yet deliberate.

later, bob