Erica Berry

[Image: “Front Door Key,” by John E. Simpson.]

Littlefoot
(excerpt)

We’ve all led raucous lives,
some of them inside, some of them out.
But only the poem you leave behind is what’s important.
Everyone knows this.
The voyage into the interior is all that matters,
Whatever your ride.
Sometimes I can’t sit still for all the asininities I read.
Give me the hummingbird, who has to eat sixty times
His own weight a day just to stay alive.
Now that’s a life on the edge.

(Charles Wright [source])

…and:

When the ego invests itself in its knowing, it is convinced that it has the whole picture. At that point, growth stops. The journey stops. Nothing new is going to happen to us after that point. The term we’re using here, “beginner’s mind,” comes from Buddhism. For Buddhists, it seems to refer to an urgent need to remain open, forever a student. A beginner’s mind always says, “I’m a learner. I’ve got more to learn.” It has to do with humility before reality, and never assuming that I understand. If there are fifty thousand levels of the mystery, maybe I’m at level forty-five. Maybe there’s more that needs to show itself to me. Can you imagine what a different world it would be if we all lived with that kind of humility?

(Center for Action and Contemplation [source])

Over the last couple of very distracting weeks, I’ve been reading — in bursts of 15 to 30 minutes or so — a book called Wolfish, by Erica Berry: an extended meditation on wolves, and their not insubstantial place in our (especially Berry’s!) world and subconscious. The book swings back and forth between information about and contemplation of wolves as such, and Berry’s personal history — especially, her history of fear.

At one point in the latter, she spends a year in Sicily as an assistant at a cooking school with two colleagues, Paul and Kiley. The three of them share a meal one evening of greens and other foodstuffs recently foraged from the countryside, moments before a hair-raising episode of (for all three of them) food poisoning:

I couldn’t help swinging the conversation to mortality.

“Okay, a question. Would you rather know in advance the exact day you were going to die, or would you rather just, you know, drop?”

“What a question, Berry,” said Paul. “Some nerve.” But he was grinning, pouring the lamb broth over the greens and forking a wad of it onto a tear of bread, eyes narrowing with thought.

“Are we talking, like, knowing years in advance, or weeks, or days?” Kiley took a swig of wine, folding her arms over her plate in that let’s-get-down-to-business gesture.

“Either way,” I said. “For the sake of argument: say you have at least a year’s warning.”

We circled the question and heaped our plates, the sky blackening as a breeze rolled in, bringing the eucalyptus trees and orange grove right to our noses, the candle in the center of the table spasming with light. We talked; we ate. Somewhere inside our bellies, unknown for another hour or so, the toxins from the first bites of the greens were working their way into our bloodstreams. Doughing our minds, our eyes, our walk. But that comes later. The poison, at first, was nearly pleasant. Like wine on an empty stomach. The room made silky around the edges.

“I’ll say it: I’d rather just drop dead,” said Kiley eventually, and we all laughed because by that point, it seemed so obvious. Torture was knowing an unwanted change was coming over one’s body and being unable to stop it.

(Erica Berry [source])

Aside from the drama of the moment, one reason I think this passage stood out for me is a recent awareness of unwanted changes in my own body… I was never and certainly am not now someone anyone would call athletic; on the other hand, my body never gave me — in my sedentary lifestyle — much reason to think about its efficiency, about its ability to perform Everyday Tasks X, Y, and Z.

Lately, though… well, it’s hard to say with any precision (probably exactly because I’ve never much thought about let alone discussed my health). Let’s just leave it for now at: wow, I’m getting old.

______

P.S. Careful observers will note something odd about this weekly “whiskey river Fridays” post: it didn’t appear until Saturday. Yesterday, see, was our move-in day: we’ve finally come to a landing, in the so-called “Research Triangle” area of North Carolina… and I just couldn’t grab enough time to wrap up the post. But I can make it appear that I did, thanks to the digital magic of back-dating! (laughing)

[Image: “Category Mistake: Cell Towers à la Palm Trees, Las Vegas, Nevada” by John E. Simpson.]

Probably a chaotic few days ahead, as The Missus and I transition from our extended state of “staying someplace” to one of “living someplace.” The distinction of staying vs. living somewhere, like a lot of distinctions, requires the drawing of rather arbitrary lines; in fact, we’ll probably be spending any given moment, post-move, more or less as we’ve been spending them for months now… with one difference. To wit: our minds will not be whirring like tops with all the things we must address to get through the next week or month. We’ll finally banish to the recycling bin all the stacks of used Post-It notes, all the scraps of notepaper covered with frantically brainstormed lists and reminders to ourselves. Gods willing, we’ll feel retired, finally — not feel that we’ve simply moved from one workplace to another (however mobile the latter may have been).

The awkward blurring of lines between one thing and another has cropped up a few times since last week. First, from whiskey river:

The world, every day, is New. Only for those born in, say, 1870 or so, can there be a meaningful use of the term postmodernism, because for the rest of us we are born and we see and from what we see and digest we remake our world. And to understand it we do not need to label it, categorize it. These labels are slothful and dismissive, and so contradict what we already know about the world, and our daily lives. We know that in each day, we laugh, and we are serious. We do both, in the same day, every day. But in our art we expect clear distinction between the two. We expect a movie to be a comedy or a drama. We expect writing to be serious writing or humorous writing. But imagine if the same thing were done to describe one’s hours or one’s days: Every day, when we buy a lollipop at the corner store, we hear a joke; someone banters with us; at we see something ha-ha in the newspaper; we watch something funny on TV; a friend tells a good story that makes us laugh. And all these thing happen even on the days when other, horrible things happen. But we don’t label our days Serious Days or Humorous Days. We know that each day contains endless nuances—if written would contain dozens of disparate passages, funny ones, sad ones, poignant ones, brutal ones, the terrifying and the cuddly. But we are often loathe to allow this in our art. And that is too bad.

(Dave Eggers [source])

And then, not from whiskey river:

What, it seems worth asking, is a wolf? The Oglala believe all animals are members of their own nations, with wolves thus deserving of “recognition as nations with full rights to live and move,” beings who are “relatives” and “equals” to humans. To the Cherokee, a wolf is a watchdog and hunter for Kana’ti, the power spirit of game animals and insects. To the Pueblo, a wolf is a gift sent by their creator, a magical spirit often represented as female with an ability to heal and instill courage, to know the night around her as easily as she knows her own bones. “In our astronomy / the Great Wolf / lived in sky, / It was… the mother of all women, / and howled her daughters’ names / into the winds of night,” writes Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan in her poem “The Fallen.”

To Swedish botanist and zoologist Carl Linnaeus, in 1758, the wolf was a creature to classify beside coyotes and jackals under the Latin genus Canis, for “dog.” While Canis lupus were wolves, Canis familiaris were our pets. Linnaeus’s main distinction was that the wolf was the one with the tail turned up at its end, like a comma flipped on its back. In recent years, after finding genetic differences between dogs and wolves to be negligible, scientists renamed dogs Canis lupus familiaris. The wolf in our family.

(Erica Berry [source])

All of which, maybe inevitably, led me to the ur-source:

The phrase [“category-mistake”] is introduced in the first chapter [of Gilbert Ryle’s 1946 book, The Concept of Mind]. The first example is of a visitor to Oxford. The visitor, upon viewing the colleges and library, reportedly inquired “But where is the University?” The visitor’s mistake is presuming that a University is part of the category “units of physical infrastructure” rather than that of an “institution”. Ryle’s second example is of a child witnessing the march-past of a division of soldiers. After having had battalions, batteries, squadrons, etc. pointed out, the child asks when is the division going to appear. “The march-past was not a parade of battalions, batteries, squadrons and a division; it was a parade of the battalions, batteries and squadrons of a division.” (Ryle’s italics) His third example is of a foreigner being shown a cricket match. After being pointed out batsmen, bowlers and fielders, the foreigner asks: “who is left to contribute the famous element of team-spirit?”

(Wikipedia [source])

One more Friday RAMH post from the road, then!

To Journey… But, Well, No: To Remain Still

If You’re Gonna Smudge the Borders, Consider Smudging Hard