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Critters Photography Writing

Robin Redbreast

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

We had another flock of robins come through again today. Many more females this time since they are on a southern migration, not northern. Robins are ground feeding birds, so it’s surprising how fast and agile they are in the air.

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Robins have long been the harbingers of spring, but for some reason, the robin is also associated with war and even with death. I wonder if its because its a migratory bird, leaving in the winter and returning in the spring. Leaving and winter reminds us of loss, while spring and returning remind us of hope.

As coincidence would have it Loren discussed Stanley Kunitz’s poem “Robin Redbreast” this week:

 

It was the dingiest bird
you ever saw, all the color
washed from him, as if
he had been standing in the rain,
friendless and stiff and cold,
since Eden went wrong.

Loren covered the poem on Veteran’s Day a day when we honor our veterans from so many wars. When I was driving yesterday, the radio played a set of ads from different organizations and companies and people in celebration of Veteran’s Day. The word Freedom was central to each and every one.

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

At poets.org, I found Sara Teasdale’s poem “There will come soft rains” that references a robin. I liked it, but it, too, is somber:

 

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

 

The page noted that this was a war time poem. My first reaction was: which war?

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But robins are also a harbinger of spring, and they cheer me so with their puffed up chests of bright scarlet; like an old-time politician thrusting out his well-filled belly before shaking the hands of Father, while patting baby Suzy on the head.

Robins are also a contradiction: they’re a territorial bird, independent and individual, but they migrate in flocks. It’s comical to watch them when they fly as a group — they fly their own path within the flock’s path, and it looks like this big disorganized cloud of fast moving but fiercely chaotic smoke. When they land on the holly berry trees, they start to squabble when others land nearby but then remember, “Oh yeah. That’s right. Cooperate’, and settle in to feed.

Today though they picked a holly tree that has a large, well entrenched grey squirrel nest in it. The birds drove that poor squirrel to distraction — just as he chased one off, another would land.

Everything is a pest for something else.

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P.S. Back online when the move and conversion are finished.

Categories
Just Shelley

Melancholia

Today was a quiet day, more mist than rain, more grey than stormy. I set out for the bird sanctuary in the Northwest corner of the state, but hadn’t gone more than an hour when I realized that I had forgotten my wallet. With my driver’s license. I carefully turned around, and just as carefully made my way home to pick it up. When I was fully legal again, it was too late for the bird sanctuary. Instead I made my way to one of my other favorite parks.

I was the only person on the paths, which suited my somber mood. Even the birds muted their singing, and whatever color still existed was dulled, as if it didn’t want to shout too loudly into the quiet.

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Two hundred years ago, if I were a woman of delicate breeding, I would describe my mood today as melancholic. And I would be in good company, sharing sisterhood with the likes of Jane Austen, who wrote about her own melancholia in a letter to her sister:

Sir William listened to me in confidence and diagnosed an acute involutional melancholia (in former times known as the black bile), complicated by insomniac tendencies, for which he compounded a tincture of opium of which I am to take six drops in a small glass of port wine each bed time. I took the draught last night, but it had no effect besides making my recurrent dream all the more vivid, so I know not whether to halve or double the dosage to-night! At all events, Sir William will bleed me on Wednesday a week should my symptoms persist unabated. I have every faith in the man: it is said that Nelson suffered horribly from night-mares until he sought Sir William’s help, and now he sleeps like a babe.

Acute involutional melancholia. You can imagine a lady of the day sitting to tea with her friends, and telling them one and all that she has been diagnosed with melancholia, “just like dear Nelson”. Hearty good health was seen as an anathema to those with refined sensibilities. Luckily, being given drops of opium in wine, or being bled frequently, prevented such unseemly bouts of robustness.

Freud wrote a paper on melancholia called “Mourning and Melancholia”. He believed that melancholia was a result of loss, compounded by not confronting the agent of loss. Instead of resolving these feelings and moving on, the sufferer internalizes the feelings, turning them against their own ego. However, lest you think that Freud was sympathetic to this state — remember that he was, perhaps, the most dispassionate of all adventurers into the psyche — he was contemptuous:

[Melancholics] are far from evincing towards those around them the attitude of humility and submissiveness that would alone befit such worthless people [… as they believe themselves to be]. On the contrary, they make the greatest nuisance of themselves, and always seem as though they felt slighted and had been treated with great injustice.

The man may have made history as a the father of Psychoanalysis, but he had the makings of a modern American politician: a combination of Republican disdain for the less fortunate, mixed in with Democratic obsession with sex.

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Of course, we know today that melancholia has many faces — ranging from those moments of quiet reflectivity, to the most severe form of depression. No matter who are, and no matter how adjusted we believe we are, we all suffer from melancholia at one time or another. As Francis Zimmermann wrote in his fascinating paper for the Journal of International Institute, titled The History of Melancholy:

The history of melancholia is that of an innately human experience of suffering becoming the object of a cultural construct. As a mood or emotion, the experience of being melancholy or depressed is at the very heart of being human: feeling “down” or blue or unhappy, being dispirited, discouraged, disappointed, dejected, despondent, melancholy, depressed, or despairing many aspects of such affective experiences are within the normal range. Everyone suffers from this kind of metaphorical melancholia, as Robert Burton said, because “Melancholy in this sense is the character of mortality” (The Anatomy of Melancholy, I.I.I.5.), that is, a figure of the human condition.

With its sense of loss and grief, you would think we would work to eliminate melancholia, and we do seek to help those suffering from severe depressions, using a combination of therapy, support, and antidepressants.

(I once heard antidepressants referred to as mood brighteners, a term I despise. It reminds me of those laundry sticks you use to remove stains from your good shirt. “Oh, look! There’s a spot of angst. I’ll just dab in this Miracle Mental Health, and it will wash right out!”)

Yet much of our creativity has its roots in melancholia, and to remove it from our lives, completely, would be to remove the shadows that shape us. Melancholia gives us sad, soft songs to accompany misted landscapes, forming a backdrop for words of poetry, and other forms of writing.

Melancholia also gives us silence; knowing when to keep still and just listen.

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Categories
Just Shelley Photography

Drops of water

The weather’s been warm and we’ve been keeping the windows open to catch the cool night air. Its odd to sit here typing at the computer with all the windows open and the fan going, listening to the rain, when a scant 100 miles away people are facing snow and ice.

St. Louis lives in that kind of space – suits me.

Last night I was in the kitchen getting some water when I heard a loud plane overhead. This isn’t that unusual, we get planes from time to time from a nearby airport. However, this sound wasn’t going away, and shook the walls. Invasion? Crash? Really lost pilot? Something I should perhaps be concerned about?

I went out on the porch and in the clear night I could see a series of Air Force transport planes flying overhead – aligned one after the other, with red beacon lights shining like tiny beads strung in a necklace. Another joined the thread as I stood and watched.

Odd how things look different when the distance changes. I know the planes are huge, they have to be from the sound. However, high overhead they’re barely more than dots wrapping a thread around the moon. But look at the following photograph, taken of a rock that’s smaller than a dime. The closeness of the camera and the action of the lens enhance and enlarge details too small to view with the naked eye.

Remember when you were a kid how you would dip your finger into a glass of water and use it to ‘paint’ pictures on the table; or you would place drops of water over writing or the tablecloth and see how the drops would magnify whatever was underneath?

I always liked looking at cloth under the drops; seeing the individual threads emerge distinct from the whole, until the drops soaked into the cloth and the effect was lost.

For some reason I was reminded of this magnifying effect of water last night, when I watched the transport ships with their tiny red lights and huge sound and faraway destinations where I imagine they fly with their running lights off. Just in case.

Categories
Just Shelley

Butterfly and Bee

 

Butterfly sat on a yellow flower, she did. A beautiful yellow flower, it was. Against the bright blue sky it shown, with nectar sweet as cane. Bee came up behind her, he did. And buzzed around her head, he flew. Tiny voice cried out, she heard. “Oh, please spare a drop for me.”

Butterfly flapped her bright wings, she did. And fluffed her feelers clean, they were. She stared at the bee by her head, he was. (Considering his desperate plea, he hoped.) Soft voice tickled the air, so cruel. “Why spare I,” she said. “This last autumn’s delight?”

Bee buzzed louder and louder, he did. In agitation at having to think, it hurt. Shutting eyes tight to focus, it thought. In thinking it forgot to fly, it fell. Below the yellow flower, it hit. Tiny brain exhausted from thought, it died. Returned to the earth of its birth.

Butterfly leaned over the flower, she did. At the bee on the ground below her, it lay. She thought of shedding a tear, in sorrow. But her time comes tomorrow, she knows. Back to the yellow flower, she turned. Lowering her head to the nectar, she supped. Warmth of sun on her wings, she felt, one last moment of peace.

Categories
Just Shelley

Wiccan Barbie

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I don’t normally do the link to major publication/major story thing, but Mark Morford’s Barbie The Hot Pagan Witch is too good to pass up. It would seem that Mattel has now come out with a Wiccan Barbie, though the Wicca may not survive the honor. Mark writes:

Secret Spells Barbie is, despite her potential and much like every one of the 150,000 weird sub-subniche Barbies on the market, entirely pointless and disposable and, unless the girls who end up with her somehow tap into their inner badass witchiness and suddenly get inspired by some divine funky moonscream to rip off Barbie’s arms and paint her hair bright red and tattoo her nipples with a Magic Marker and impale her on a red-hot hair pin and suspend her upside down from a dreamcatcher, well, she does nothing to further the cause of funky gorgeous goddess-thick witchness and nothing to further the cause of earthly luscious pagan interconnectedness or divine feminine power.

Not that she claims to. Not that this was ever Mattel’s point, or Barbie’s raison d’etre, really. And I suppose it’s sort of wildly unfair to hope that Barbie might actually inspire girls beyond the hair-twirling saccharine fetishism of shopping and friends and cars and boys and shopping and money and dye jobs and shopping and fake careerism and shopping.

I was given a Barbie once for Christmas because all little girls back then were given Barbies. I can’t remember the outfits I got to go with the doll, but I soon became very bored with it. All you could do with the doll is put clothes on it, take them off and put other clothes on. What was the fun of that?

True, I did have a time when clothes, and the acts of putting them on and taking them off, were an important part of my life. When I reached puberty and became interested in boys and fitting in (not necessarily in that order) clothes were a part of the process. However, this obsessive interest in wearing the right thing and spending a lot of money on clothes to become this perfect paragon of rightness faded when I hit a certain age and realized that a pair of jeans and a nice cotton shirt lasts forever and feels great. And I don’t think Mattel makes a Barbie with worn jeans and a cotton shirt.

When we were little, we were supposed to use our imaginations and put ourselves into the glamorous world of Barbie, but how could we? The image was as plastic as the doll. I had brown/red hair, not blonde. I had no boobs or hips when I was a kid, and Barbie had no nipples or hair under the arms or in the groin. My imagination could extend to pirates and make believe worlds with white rabbits and cards that talked, but it couldn’t make Barbie into anything I could understand, much less appreciate and seek to emulate.

I gave the doll to my dog to chew. He had much more fun with it than I ever did.

Update

Speaking of spending just to spend, Sheila writes about an eBay auction of Beanie Babies that has some extremely funny comments by the person making the sale. (Jeneane wishes this guy blogged. I want to use his secrets for my own auction – don’t buy these rocks! They’re just rocks!)

But the ultimate in disposable society and spending is covered in Sheila’s story on Disposable DVDs. Want to know why corporate America has us by the (virtual) balls? Disposable DVDs is a hint.