Keats in the Field

Hmm...I really just want to start and keep posting pictures of my immediate landscape, looking at what's here, what changes, what we can see, and this part of a bigger project I don't have the web-capacity to do right now.  But simply investigating the world, as those happy, sincere "natural philosophers" of the 18th/19th centuries did, is now too naive, too automatically discredited. There is, after all, always an expert out there who seems to know everything, or a website to be the memory and mind we don't have to develop on our own.  I still delight in the local mysteries.  Like this:
 

So, a phone pic, and an email to the relevant friend.  

Me:  "Matt, since you know everything outside, what are these little spit balls on the grass stalks?  Hard to see in pic, but they're bubbly, just like a wad of new spit.  I assume some sort of insect activity, but...?"

Matt:  "Ahh yes, these are classic. They are spittlebug nests, so spit balls is fairly accurate a term. A spittlebug is the nymph stage of a froghopper. The nests are used for thermoregulation and defense against predators."

See, Matt knows stuff.

But then, I don't even have that excuse for what follows.  I'm reading Keats, well, re-reading, to prep for an evening class.  He invites us to a sort of nature in "Sleep and Poetry":

                                ...a bowery nook 

Will be elysium—an eternal book 

Whence I may copy many a lovely saying         65

About the leaves, and flowers—about the playing 

Of nymphs in woods, and fountains; and the shade 

Keeping a silence round a sleeping maid; 

And many a verse from so strange influence 

That we must ever wonder how, and whence         70

It came...

This isn't quite a quiet Elysium, this June-in-Hallsville, Missouri, with the days of storms,

   

The surge in everything growing...

The ubiquitous vermin...

A front yard that isn't quite a nymphs' bower...

More Keats:

          ...Yet I rejoice: a myrtle fairer than 

E’er grew in Paphos, from the bitter weeds 

Lifts its sweet head into the air, and feeds         250

A silent space with ever sprouting green.

(But then, I've been in Paphos, about 2 years ago, at Christmas.  And it wasn't nearly as green.  Though I liked the Neolithic huts down the road at Khirokitia, and may someday have a bedroom like one of them.)

Yes, out in the field, everything green surges...

  

And the pond ripe with new cattails, and a swamp beast...

 

  More weeds, along with our local abominable polar bear...

 

But out of all this--hardly Geography-as-science, nor even proper field notes.  "Situated," yes, and sure, there are bits to unravel, like those mushrooms sprouting from bales of hay used as insulation, now slowing sprouting grass and other fellow travelers.  And those green fields, which exist years un-plowed, un-grazed, un-mowed, much to the scorn of my neighbors, who see non-use as an occasion of sin, economic and mortal.  Fields under-girded by property taxes, sentiment, threatened always at the margins by county road crews ground-cutting the ditch weeds, causing more erosion than the rains, or by Boone Rural Electric Coop insisting on killing every tree under and within 15 foot of their lines.  And Keats does without the 6 ticks I found crawling on me that day from one dog-walk, or the rush of traffic along a country road, always a danger if the dogs hop through the rusty fence, or plunge ahead of me too soon going home.

Out of this, what?  Are there local knowledges that can matter?

More Keats:

The visions all are fled—the car is fled         155

Into the light of heaven, and in their stead 

A sense of real things comes doubly strong, 

And, like a muddy stream, would bear along 

My soul to nothingness: but I will strive 

Against all doubtings, and will keep alive         160

The thought of that same chariot, and the strange 

Journey it went...

later, bob

Comments welcome.