interlude continued

A quick word on the absentia: I have been houseguest-sitting for the past few days and have not had a chance to do any reading at all. I did, however, cruise the used bookstores of Victoria and the Times Colonist book sale and found a whole bunch of gems. Pocketbook considerably lighter, I am now the proud owner of the following titles, which will hopefully make their way onto this blog in the near future:

From Munro's,
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun (w/aigu over the second "u"—and the only "new" book in the bunch)

From Russell Books,
Andrew Dobson, The Green Reader
Terry Glavin, Waiting for the Macaws and Other Stories from the Age of Extinctions (this should be the next post, as I was reading it with Gayton—a stark contrast and fascinating juxtaposition)
Robert Gottlieb, Environmentalism Unbound: Exploring New Pathways for Change
Stephanie Kaza, Mindfully Green: A Personal and Spiritual Guide to Whole Earth Thinking
Pojar and Mackinnon, Plants of Coastal British Columbia, including Washington, Oregon, and Alaska
Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-eye View of the World
Spider Robinson, Melancholy Elephants (which is my favourite of his short stories, so I hope the anthology is as good)

From Snowden's,
C. Miller, Some Parasites of British Sheep, with Some Suggestions for Their Eradication and Control (complete with advertisements for a tantalizing variety of "sheep dips")

From TCBS,
Henry Beard, Zen for Cats
Vinson Brown, Reading the Woods
Deborah Coates, Cat Haiku: The Ancient Art of Japanese Poetry—Cat-Style [sic]
Theresa Corrigan and Stephanie Hoppe, With a Fly's Eye, Whale's Wit, and Woman's Heart: Animals and Women
Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein, Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: A Mystical Excursion into the Natural World
Paula Gunn Allen, Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women
Ted Harrison, Children of the Yukon
Harold G. Henderson, An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Basho to Shiki
Monte Hummel, Endangered Spaces: The Future for Canada's Wilderness
Ken Kiernan, This...is British Columbia (whose second installment I recently found at Fireside Video, which has a fascinating array of gardening texts and romance novels)
Nancy Larrick, Room for Me and a Mountain Lion: Poetry of Open Space
Bruce Mitchell, The Love of Big Cats
Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf
Ian Niall, The New Poacher's Handbook (not sure if this is serious or not...will report back)
Bhikku Nyanasobhano, Landscapes of Wonder: Discovering Buddhist Dhamma in the World Around Us
Reader's Digest, The Bedside Book of Nature
Sierra Club, Ecotactics: The Sierra Club Handbook for Environment Activists
Mrs. Herbert Strang, The Great Book of School Stories for Girls: Play Up!
Henry David Thoreau, Walden or Life in the Woods (nope, didn't already have it...)
Bill Watterson, The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book
- - - ., Weirdos from Another Planet!

Some common themes making their way throughout, certainly. It will be interesting to see where the attention wanders over the course of reading.

In the meantime, let me direct your attention Glavin-wards with this brief, but compelling, excerpt:

The simple premise of this book is that all these extinctions are related. The intent of this book is to explore the relationships among and between all of these extinctions, and one cannot even begin to do that by relying on the prism of environmentalism. As a separate category of thought, environmentalism is of little use in comprehending the scale of extinctions the world is suffering. Extinction is the fate befalling the things Hosea described—the wild and the tamed, the land and everyone that dwelt therein, and the beasts of the field as well as the fowls of heaven. All these extinctions are part of the same phenomenon and properly part of the same conversation. The forces at work in the world are "not well understood," to borrow the vernacular of scientific journals. But they are cultural forces. (Waiting for the Macaws 5)

Thank goodness (which stubbornly tried to typo as "goofness" three times; perhaps a sign, but I feebly resist).

interlude

Not strictly to form (then again, I've always favoured the functional), but there is a new Robert Hass book, The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems. His work, including the title poem, has received mixed reviews, but the poetry of Robert Hass will always be among my favourite.

Hass himself is delightfully helpful; while working on Ecodemia, I stumbled across his team-taught course in poetry and the environment, and emailed him to ask for the syllabus and permission to use it on my site. He not only obligingly complied, but encouraged my fledgling idea by suggesting sites like River of Words as good fits for the site I had in mind.

So, thanks again, Dr. Hass. I will be picking up the book this afternoon, and reading it in the woods somewhere so I can come back and write it up. This is going to be fun.

marifield drive, victoria: interwoven wild

We’re digging in the clay, MF chopping away with his shovel and me plunging viciously with my pitchfork, and an enormous, vital nightcrawler springs from the tortured earth. It’s a strange feeling, massacring thousands of shining white bulbs in order to prepare ground for planting—counterintuitive on this first day to the point of visceral shock. When the bulbs pulse and move, scattering in panic at our brutal penetration, I struggle to justify our well-meaning annihilation.

I become rapidly less and less helpful, opting instead to sit crosslegged and pull the stems and roots one by one, rationalizing to my partner and myself that this is more thorough, will prevent the reappearance of these all-too-willing “pests” and their subsequent second holocaust inflicted by our tools. It’s not that slow, methodical murder is exactly better, rather that it feels less wanton, more conscious somehow and connected.

Reading Don Gayton’s Interwoven Wild: An Ecologist Loose in the Garden on my bus ride after gardening seems to make sense of some of my moral confusion. For a more careful, less eminently subjective, review, stroll on over to Book Addiction. For me, Gayton's methodical simplicity of approach, detail-oriented and focused on the experience of gardening, jives with my slow, mucky preference. He makes me yearn to compost, as an activity rather than an ideology, and wonder again aloud with MF at the regenerative power of severed worms, who, apparently, eat microbes rather than leaves.

I keep wrestling with my conscience as I tear down ivy and ferociously unearth clusters of nondescript bulbs. My continual fall back to the nondescript is encouraging me to pick up a plant identification guide, to engage in "the slow process of recognizing and committing plants to memory" (64); I feel like this indiscriminate late-stage microcosm of a plant- and insect-based holocaust would be alleviated if I took the time to get to know these plants, first. Perhaps herein lies my tendency to revert to meticulous, patient slowness as I pull each "weed" and all of its roots, then replace as much of the soil as I can. MF's approach is much faster—in the amount of time it takes me to clear two metres, he can normally manage five. Gayton, also reverting to language of warfare and conquest, addresses this tendency to guilt thus:

My arsenal for the weed war is pretty basic. I have my hands, the dandelion fork, a scythe and a dutch hoe. Henry David Thoreau mused about this implement while in his garden, wondering what gave him the right to "make invidious distinctions with his hoe," choosing which plants should live, and which should die. I have none of Mr. Thoreau's qualms. (56)

I, on the other hand, certainly do. If not just for the sake of the discriminate displacement of these plants as groups or individuals, then I am certainly concerned for their dependents—the post-World War civilians teeming with life and left with barren, stripped soil to bake in the May sunshine and eventually starve. And yet, this moral dilemma, this continual confrontation with the very real and immediate impact of human aesthetic intervention, is perhaps the most present I have been in [the pithy, short] ages [of the seemingly interminably young].

Speaking of presence, I intend to ask the Victoria Zen Centre's Abbot, Venerable Eshu Martin, about the morality of gardening according to the Rinzai Zen tradition tonight at the weekly Tuesday sit in the University of Victoria's Interfaith Chapel. Perhaps musing silently on the breath and its destructive, essential tendencies will simplify my guilty gardening. More on this later this evening, I suppose—this book and its setting will have to exist twice, I think.

In the meantime, I shall continue to approach this garden with the overwhelming astral application of significance, hyperbolically (and perhaps accurately) posed by Gayton: "one could even imagine a system of astrology based on trees" (78), an arbourology that distills and elevates. Though certainly a problematically anthropocentric approach to the immediacy of non-human nature, perhaps this quasi-neopagan imposition would indeed provide another kind of lens, one intensely focused on the role of immediacy in a grander sense of the moment.