Essays
New & Current Essays
Watch this space for updates and excerpts of fresh work —
excerpt:
Varieties of Churchgoing in Ladds Addition, Part I
(from 3QuarksDaily.com, 18 April 2022)
Full of good cheer – when does walking not perk me up? – on a too-cool March morning, past houses nicer than mine by several hundred grand with wide verandahs and Craftsman gables, and through a deep urban forest of elms, I make my way towards church.
Church!
Not exactly my normal behavior – not for lo these many decades since achieving my apostasy, my ex-Baptist-ness, and then at length making peace with it. I carried no axe to grind. Though I walked right past a low-slung building with a sign reading – no kidding! – “Chinese Baptist Church.”
I’ll return to that. But today my destination is yet more exotic, you could say, though just one more block away. “St. Sharbel Catholic Church, Maronite Rite” it proclaims itself. Whatever that might mean. My mission was to find out by attending the eleven-o’clock service.
This neighborhood, which I live right next to though not quite in – seems oddly attractive to churches. One of the oldest planned developments in the western US, called “Ladd’s Addition” after its 1891 developer, former mayor William S. Ladd, it forms a square just a half-mile on a side, yet is studded with temples and houses of worship, sanctuaries grand or cozy, surprising or predictable … so many varieties of religious belief, so many flavors and even hues. Even in ethnically-challenged Portland.
To what end? Serving what need or what god (or gods)? Who can say. Answer: Me. Or I can try, anyway.
For I find I’m always interested, no matter how many times I pass them by on daily walks, no matter how many Sunday mornings (or other worshipful times unknown to me) I may choose to sleep in or go for hikes or burrow into my writing life as if there were no Sabbath … always I notice myself noticing as I walk by, in the back-mind where feelings bubble up and ask for some kind of meaningful order. …
Always I think about it. What I am missing/not-missing-at-all-thank-you? I might think about that line from Philip Larkin’s poem “Church Going”:
A serious house on serious earth it is
I’m interested in the seriousness. These structures of aspiration. The weekly bubble of time set apart. What is it, really. And why am I, fifty years after giving it all up, still drawn. Sometimes with tears in my eyes. Sometimes not.
So I have decided to make a small pilgrimage. Over the next few weeks I’ll walk by the churches and temples. Find out their histories. Go in if I’m not too abashed. I’ll try to feel what it feels like. And wonder what it means.
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“Bosch in the Burning World”
Note to the Reader: Georgia Review organized an entire issue (starting with the cover) around this chapter from The Mountains of Paris. The essay is about a strange painting – but all Bosch’s paintings are strange, aren’t they? As is life…
excerpt:
At the joining of the Dommel and the Aa, a town was built and called “Bosch” after its forest. It prospered, rivaling Utrecht in that southern part of the Netherlands. In its churches there was music. In town there was money. The two rivers were combined to make a moat for protection. “Dommel” meant drowse. “Aa” spoke for itself.
At the joining of the Dommel and the Aa, a man called after his town (and thus, a man called Forest) slipped in and out of realities, painting, succeeding, marrying, worshipping. Always succeeding. Though he slipped in and out.
At the joining of drowse and ah were visions. Daydreams. Awe perhaps, also – in the way of dreams, uncanny. Bordering on nightmare, perhaps, also. He painted what he saw. Though what he saw was the unseen, that world where everything mattered.
In our world, nothing seemed to matter. Our world was burning, and no one noticed.
But he did.
* * *
Hieronymus Bosch painted earth as blissy, fruity, naked, and ostensibly sinful. He painted bizarre musical Hell. Those are the ones everybody knows. And in 1502 he painted St. Anthony looking straight at me. Stopping me in my day, my striding, enjoying, pleasantly-privileged day. Stopping me, you might say, dead.
It is a hard fate for me to be arrested by Bosch. His canvases are moralistic, full of contemptus mundi – just that otherworldliness I knew as a fundamentalist, and rejected, and saved my life by committing to this world, and no other.
But then. . . “this world” ought to be plural, worlds, since there’s so plainly more than one. The outer world, and the inner. There’s the catch. And there he caught me: Bosch did. St. Anthony did.
An inwardness shines out from these busy, surfacy paintings. It is hard to explain. Much easier to get caught up in the chutes-and-ladders comedy of it, the cartoon evil and the incomprehensible vice and, really, isn’t it just adorable, all this sinning and sincerity, the pinky nudes in their apparently damnable naughtiness? . . .
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excerpt: Every Right Act is an Ark
Published in The Fourth River Spring 2016. (Pushcart Prize nomination)
This excerpt also appears in Kathleen Dean Moore’s “In a Time of Extinction, a Call to Life,” a spoken-work performance with pianist Rachelle McCabe.
Here is how I have come to think about the future, with all its terrors: That there will be flotillas of Arks, uncountable. Tiny handmade ones, and massive ones; science-arks like battleships, and garden-arks like rowboats – set into the forward-river of time, to sail if possible through the bottleneck, the narrow part of the hourglass of our era. Some by accident. Some by design.
They can’t all be stopped, for this is how the world works!
There will be Arks for fungi. Arks for megafauna. Arks for orchids and aphids and weeds and worms. Grandstand wilderness Arks with million-dollar funding, and anonymous Arks, memorials of lost passion. Arks like Moses adrift in the bulrushes. Arks like coracles of Irish monks, ferrying their manuscripts to safety. Arks for victory. Arks for escape. Arks intentional and Arks ironic. Arks like flotsam in a torrent, carrying who knows what. Seeds and flowers, babies and youngsters. Spores and flagellates, dirt clods and lumps indistinguishable. Some to perish. Some to come through.
And then what? To touch, chancewise, on dry land. And start the world anew.
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Of Frisbees, Physarum, and Cow Paths
a creative code
Published in Ecotone Spring 2013.
All semester long I had something gnawing at the back of my mind, each time I entered our classroom. Mulling it over. Looking for the way.
As spring finds Missoula (at last), I amble across the quad, my attention on a game of frisbee that has appeared between the squared-off walkways and melting berms of snow. Coltish youngsters disport themselves on the green and my heart is gladdened. I am the Visiting Writer, at liberty for gladness: not lugging a hundred undergraduate essays, as I have done for too much of my life, I teach but one tiny graduate seminar to nine young worthies in the Environmental Writing Program. I observe their work. I reflect, I suggest. They are hard workers, eager for crit, for challenge. And yet – inevitably – just a bit homogenized by academia. They’ve been obedient for so long. So many grammatical sentences. So many semicolons.
A crimson frisbee floats up into the bright spring sky. From across the quad a barefoot redhead canters toward me, looking up, Mickey Mantle of windage and distance – lunges in a last speedy burst, makes the catch, and somehow also avoids the gimpy and all-too-breakable Visiting Writer. Impish grin fringed in a soft beardlet. I am charmed.
The speed, the color, the float. Where are they? That’s what I’ve been wanting to ask my correct young writers.
* * *
Funny thing is, each week in that classroom I’ve eyed this handbill posted I suppose by a vigilant grounds crew: “Don’t Make Cowpaths!” The renegade-cow imagery is mildly amusing. But it’s the exhortation to our already-mannerly students that obscurely bothers me. Against straying. Against cavorting, even.
Landscape architects call them desire paths, these spontaneous tracks – these adventitious angles and trodden rhomboids, crissing and crossing the architect’s neat squares. Practical unruliness. Redesign by motion and desire.
It’s what I have been trying to say in class: Follow the desire path.
Maybe you’ve read recently (as I have) about the work of Toshiyuki Nakagaki, who discovered that Physarum polycephalum, a slime mold, is quite talented at solving problems. If you hide little mounds of tempting oat flakes within a maze, Physarum will discover the pathways that most efficiently link them. In a cunning experiment, later researchers laid the piles upon a map of the U.S., just where our major cities are. And voilà, Physarum drew the Interstate Freeway system, with uncanny exactness. Really. You can look it up.
This is intelligence of the Gregory Bateson kind: living process that marshals information and shapes solutions – no big brain needed. Desire paths. And Donald Griffin, a founder of the behaviorist-defying discipline of cognitive ethology, brought us to understand that it is pleasure that shapes us all: nature’s shortcut, drawing us to adaptive behavior because it feels good.
Desire paths. For how many thousands of millennia have hominids been tracing just-right tracks – following the inner/outer logic of slope, goal, exertion – making foot-sense of the world? Perfectly, thoughtlessly rational. The very paths that become, in time, roads or even freeways. Originating nonetheless in a logic of desire.
A desire path is what every good piece of imagining follows. It might be a very smart piece – an experiment, an essay, a painting; it might be full of information and intellect and cold logic. But I guarantee that it comes to be born – like all living things – from a burst of pleasure. Sheer randy pleasure. Hooking up. Finding pattern that feels right, that has trueness and beauty at once. Seated in front of my blank pages, I tell myself Follow the path of binding emotion. Sometimes it works.
* * *
Here be danger, though. All of us are (secretly) sophomore-hearted, wishing the world into fantasy and hogwash. It is a learned vigilance to prefer reality. Beside my copy of Nakagaki sits a sadly beautiful book about mushrooms – an important book, pointing toward mycological restoration of our poor violated planet – grounded in the author’s encyclopedic knowledge and total commitment. But “sadly” because a frantic, hand-waving enthusiasm oversteers this Mycelium tome (to name it would be unkind) into a smash-up of hippy overreach – cosmic leaps, shamanic baloney, analogies taken literally. And a desperate conclusion, utterly unsuppported, that the mushroom is not only (like all life) a remarkable information-user, but is also conscious. Sentient. Woo woo.
When reality is fabulous (as it always is!), why lard it with fables?
It’s a breathtaking world down there, in the mycological Other Kingdom. Perhaps it will offer solutions to our global mess. But to find them, we’ll need that winsome humility of scientists, their chaste obedience to fact – to the difference between what we know, what we suspect, and what we (wildly) might hope for.
* * *
So it was no small thing to watch my young writers learning to follow the glimmerings of pleasure, while staying grounded in the facts. In weekly crit, in earnest conferences, in moments of midnight revision, a shapeliness emerged when we allowed it to. Not a grid, usually. But a beautiful surprise, an unlikely balancing asymmetry. It made us laugh, and then revolved a long time in the mind. It expressed something about the way this world is put together – spare, strange, original. A thing that flies, or works in secret, or emerges from chaos to offer order and solace.
A word floats in the back of my mind. I sense it, know it’s there, can’t quite grasp it yet. A pleasure in waiting for it, sweet like the moment before love-making. An idea is coming and it will be beautiful – someone will catch it, and all will be glad.
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*asterisk indicates essays that also appear as chapters in The Mountains of Paris
*“Vasty Love and the Big Comedown,” December Magazine. Finalist for Curt Johnson Nonfiction Award, 2019.
*“The Mysterious Barricades,” Seven Hills Review (vol. 23, 2018). Second Place Award.
*”St. Eustache,” Tiferet: Journal of Art, Literature, and Creative Spirit (Spring 2016). Winner of Nonfiction Award.
*”Every Right Act is an Ark,” The Fourth River (Spring 2016). Pushcart Prize nomination.
*“The Voices.” Soundings Review (Summer 2016).
*”The Run: A Memnoir,” Pooled Ink (November 2014) Annual Collection of Northern Colorado Writers. Winner of Nonfiction Award and Pushcart Prize nomination.
“Of Frisbees, Physarum, and Cow Paths: A Creative Code,” Ecotone (Spring 2013).
“Eco-City: In Search of a Green Urbanism for the Not-Rich,” Orion (May-June 2010).
“Northward,” High Country News (22 June 2009).
“Unlocking the Hips,” Portland Queer (anthology). Ed. Ariel Gore. Portland: Lit Star (2009).
“Of Time and the River and the Big Shiny Buildings,” Oregon Humanities (Spring 2008).
“Six Good Places,” High Country News (29 October 2007).
“City Gods and Sacred Waters,” OregonLand, American Society of Landscape Architects (Spring 2007).
“Boots on the Ground in the Sherwood Forest,” Reading Portland: The City Told. Eds. Peter Donahue and John Trombold. Portland/Seattle: Oregon Society/University of Washington Press (December 2006).
“Some Questions about Sexless Nature Writing,” Postwestern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space. Ed. Susan Kollin. Lincoln: University of Nebraska (2007).
“A Democracy of Water,” Earth Island Journal (Spring 2005).
“The Slashpile Inventory,” Creative Nonfiction (Spring 2005).
“Nature Is Not a Club to Bash People With,” High Country News “Writers on the Range” Syndicate (February 2004).
“The Wildness of Failure,” Northern Lights (Winter 2002).
“Queer Pants,” The Bear Deluxe (Fall 2000).
Five essays in Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings, eds., Garland, 1998, ISBN: 0815318766).
“Practice of the Presence of the Wild,” EarthLight: Magazine of Spirituality and Ecology (Winter 1990).
“Descendentalism: The Thoreauvian Inscape,” Contemporary Philosophy 12 (1989).
“Social Darwinism and Natural Theodicy,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 23 (1988).
And some Fiction:
“First Descent,” (short story) Isotope (Spring 2004).