What fell?

I tell yall.
It was big en heavy,
en loaded wit
sharp talons.
xx&urr XX&URR
witches waya sayin
parta sumpin bigger
like a lock
dat press by de key
en shoot de bolt
cclick cclick BOOOM,
like sum playin card
leff on de table
after de New Deal.
En wha happen den?
Eyes gunna tell yall
he aint gunna fall.
No he dun up
en split,
leff her lone.
Dat darn ol' cone
coulda cum down
on his head.
En who wanna
play dummy?
Bess he lie low
en play dead
less he be depress.

On time

Winter still holds us in its icy grip, despite the passing spring equinox. Meteorologist are predicting warmer weather soon.
I am here... the result of the cycles and sequences of events in which my ancestors participated, fashioned also by individual transformations.

Apropos fashioned: Today I wore the same outdoor clothing as I have for the past hundred days: a crocheted woolen scullcap decorated with hundreds of pink pearls, a loosely handknit mohair shawl, rustbrown leather gloves, and a dark blue duffel coat with toggle buttons made of reindeer horn...in case you fail to recognize me by my face.

Please excuse me for my computer illiteracy, or lack of etiquette.
Blogging out now before it gets too late.

On Lotta Lotass' Redwood (Ps. 96:12)

Snows still flurry here today. Seven days after the spring equinox.
Yet trees like these rise majestically above petty concerns and poverty. I am playing solitaire with a Redwood logger’s prayer book, a deck of picture postcards that were once sent by relatives and friends. Order is not immediately apparent in any well-shuffled deck. But when you begin meditating on playing cards - gathering, pressing, scanning, importing, retouching and cropping the motive - you eventually begin to distinguish the rank and file of each flake, unique people whom you never knew. And if you are lucky, a pile of sawdust will suddenly appear to mask what it would reveal.

Forgive me, for scratching xxu&rr at your portal for so long. Rubbing my twigs dry, day after day, I am still hoping to ignite a fire and release a seed to sow. Redwood cones call for extreme heat.

Redwood fire

On Redwood and other natural names (Gen 11:3)

for Lotta Lottas and other catkins

I am here in a land where a mushroom is not just a vulgar word for fungi, but a fleshy space where common names spell survival. Who would not prefer a Karl Johan (Boletus edulis) to a Sly Fly (Amanita phalloides), regardless of the taste or smell of the pulp, once they had learned to survive the two?

I live in a land where the alder, the tallest of which is altus, have red wood and flowers called catkins. Alders grow quickly and bees flock to their pollen. Come let us call it alder of the genus alnus, the deepest of which is altus, and have black wood and enrich the soil in burnt areas and in mines.

Come let us (also pronounced ‘lotass’ in other parts of the world, for the world no longer has but one tongue) move east and find a desert and settle there and chop and split wood, dig cubby holes, build a fire, and so live by that hearth, where nothing they plan will condescend and confuse us.

On Lotta Lotass' Redwood 1:5

“Trees, according to their type, correspond to the perception and cognition of the good and the true from which intelligence and wisdom derive. For that reason, the ancients, proficient in the knowledge of correspondences, performed their sacred rituals in groves. And thus trees so often replace Scripture, and the sky the church….”

Emmanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and its Wonders, and Hell

Whatever you may be expecting when you click on the link that brings you to Lotta Lotass’ Redwood site, you must first step onto a digital doormat and swat your paw at a number. cclLICK. Is this an illusion of order, a table of contents in the syntax of biblical references, a list of prayers for the canonical hours, a stack of library cards, or a bowl of milk? And where are the missing links in Linnaean binomial taxonomy? From here on you are only a cclLICK away from a picture of the genus Sequoia, named after an indigenous tribe of the North American indians. Each postcard is a vivisection of a pre-Christian pith, a life lived among giant trees, and the people who felled, sawed and transported them. The latter are literally as small as Tom Thumbs or Nils Holgerssons next to the vast perimeters and heights reached in one, and only one, place in the world.

While the bark - Meoww meoww - of Lotass' work tells you that questions about the work in progress can be sent to the 'ordfabriken' [word factory], I am still waiting for a response: why Redwood? Is it a coincidence? A question of good or bad luck? Size, time, place? Why not a local species: a 'tall' [pine], an 'ek' [oak, spoke], a 'gran' [spruce], or a 'bok' [beech, book]?

“Tall stories grow naturally among the tall timber,” says Louis Untermeyer in his foreword to the Wonderful Adventures of Paul Bunyan (Heritage Press, 1945). Paul Bunyan is the legendary folktale of a lumberjack in the Northwest who was born in the days when the country itself was young, and forests were vast and dark, and men were few and lonely. Dwarfed by the trees, men had to make themselves big, if only by way of their imagination. Paul Bunyan is the immigrant pioneer dream, a symbol of youth, bigger than the trees. “The Best is never good enough, and even the Biggest lifts itself by its bootstraps to be bigger. 'That,' we say proudly - perhaps a little too proudly – 'that’s America for you!'"

Lotass' Redwood brings lonely immigrants back to reality, to the Old World revisited. And of course, there was so much more of the world back then, however unevenly distributed. When you went west, you promised not to be so “territorial” about the land you left behind, but I could read in your letters that you were frightened, that you too had been wounded. You couldn't let go of what you believed was your birth right. Eliza Doolittle's lines gradually became more and more evasive, like an actress who has rehearsed for hours on end for a role, without really understanding how the play really ends. Is that so?

Back home the Internet lynx is likely to close in - xu&rr xu&rr- and haunt you for want of more. And then a storm is sure to rise up in Littleland, and everything must be cut back down, sawed and sectioned for transport. No more giant branches or book shelves or tree rings to climb on, leap and swing from. And remember how we used to laugh at the cartoons. Little Orphan Annie and ‘gee whiskers’ and ‘leapin’ lizards, and ‘warbucks’ and you will be alone once again in the clear cut, among the stubs, the twigs, the slash and the scrub. The “America trunks” are long since gone, removed, transported, emptied. Abandoned by generations before you, though you are still hanging onto the handle. And you are ashamed to say so. Why is this so?

You would begin by collecting a thing, things, and then a structure in which you could contain things, like fear and loneliness and where did I come from and where am I going, and all the other things that are everywhere always so alike. Do you have enough of that thing now, that thing on this thing? Is there a nature reserve big enough to contain it? Don’t worry, it’s still somewhere around here, a protected species. So when are you coming home?

...tbc

On Lotta Lotass

When the Swedish Academy announced last week that Lotta Lotass had been appointed to seat no. 1, I have to admit my curiosity nearly ran amuck. I had never read anything by her before, though the name sounded familiar. Her family name alone ‘Lotass’ [lynx paw] was enough to leave a scratch, which is pronounced: Xu&rr XU&RR. That no single person by the family name ‘Lotass’ exists in the Swedish public telephone directory, coupled with the fact that the word ‘lotass’ does not exist in the Swedish Academy’s own glossary of Swedish words, is curious - to say the least. Xu&rr XU&RR . Nor is the first name ‘Lotta’ on the Swedish Academy’s list of first names. Otherwise we know that Lotta is a nickname for Charlotta, a feminine diminutive of Charles - Purrr Purrr – and that a ‘lotta’ is a dutiful member of the Swedish Women’s Voluntary Defence Organization, a kind of a local girl scout.

Lo and behold her paw, I think I’ve got it: a poetic Pseudonym At Work. Perfect for Internet publications, with lots of links to what is to come from this particular species of a rare (undomesticated) domestic animal. An illegitimate kitten (born 1964) is to become a legitimate member of the family on 20 December, even though she's unlisted.

To refresh our window, let us recall that this is a beast that still lives in the forests that cover most of Sweden’s inland territory, and in rocky places. It prowls mostly at night like most Internet users. The lynx also likes to climb trees and go out on limbs. Its paws are large enough to serve as snowshoes, which prevent it - unlike its prey - from breaking through the crust. The lynx lives mostly on foxes and deer, and sometimes on sheep and chickens. The female lynx is known to use her claws to fight viciously for her kit n kin, her most powerful links to the future.

So the Swedish Academy is installing a Swedish girl scout to use her lynx paws to work hard, primarily in defence of the Swedish language, in a modern global medium. The Swedish Academy is installing the AUTOR_ETER program, a species of persona non grata to do the dirty work, and catch up.

Having done my homework, a little basic research, I proceeded to google the name “Lotta Lotass” and take a walk to my local bookstore, where I purchased a copy of “Den röda himlen” [The red sky]. There I note (on the back cover flap) that Lotta Lotass was born in 1964 in Borsheden, a small town in western Dalarna, the province most known for its Swedish cultural work horses. Her maternal grandmother’s father, Leonard Karlsson, was a diamond driller for the Grängesberg mining company who disappeared while working in Russia at the outbreak of World War I. He was pronounced non-existent on the 20th of December 1920.

We’ve got less than a year from now to find out for sure whether or not Lotta Lotass really exists. Her installation is planned for the 20th of December 2009 according to a press release from the Academy (6 mars 2009), in Swedish only. Read, and read on. What could be a more legitimate cause to celebrate?