EXCERPTS : : Marking the Magic Circle
From the shapes of men's lives imparted by the places where they have experience, good writing comes.
—William Carlos Williams
Here, it is morning now. Long dreaming drifts have laid their curves high and deep across the roads. Public power is still off. Not even the mailman or the paper carrier will make it through today. White shifting skiffs of snow still move over the fields flowing like currents over riverbed. I build up the fire again and the stovepipe begins to ping, the drafts wheeze, the fly ash circles softly upward, then disappears. Water for coffee heats on the stove. But for the skittish wind, there is no movement outside. I wait at the desk. Suddenly, a red-shafted flicker lights among the ice-glazed branches of the apple tree and begins to peck its way into a frozen core. I watch that black half-moon on its breast as it pecks, stops, a black shining eye cast upward, then pecks again. In the frozen field, the horses wait for their oats and alfalfa and I see the shapes of two pheasants by their feeders -- guo gi picking up the smallest kernels of grain. Everyone still sleeps. I close the draft and damper on the stove. The dog has finished her morning dance and whine and is ready to go out.
At the open door, I see the Blue Mountains darkened with pine, the lower slopes open, white, smooth. I remember my earliest crayon-scribbled pictures on that heavy paper from grade school: huge white mountains in the background, a foreground of trees on green hills, blue creek coming down, and in the center always a gabled house, smoke scrawling gray out the chimney, a few stick figures with hats. I think of my grandfathers and grandmothers in their coastal graves in the shadows of Mt. Rainier, of my wife and children in their inland beds asleep, of the Columbia waiting for all our lives to melt as this snow will soon. I go inside to the silence, surrounded by the old wood walls with openings to the light, openings leaking wind....
A region is a microcosm -- a magic circle centered on home. The values generated by that circle are many, but I have limited myself here to three -- confidence, wholeness, and intimacy. For me, the authentic map of the universe is composed of these microcosms -- a mosaic of specific human constructs crossing all abstract political, geographic, economic, and racial boundaries. This view of region as microcosm stands in contrast to the more dangerous metrocentric fantasy of region as province. When defined as province, region becomes an edge in a far remote place, a fragment of some empire with a far-away center. When the magic circle is defined as province, local life can be drained of significance, since only those who live at The Center are real. Thus, local intimacy, confidence, and wholeness are threatened. In contrast, region as microcosm enables an artist living anywhere -- including the Northwest -- to get work done, to achieve character, belief, aesthetic, purpose, and style. Region as province imposes a centralizing political and demographic metaphor which can artificially elevate the significance of artists who live in political or population centers, and artificially dismiss significant artistic achievements that are not centralized by non-artistic forces. An artist who chooses not to live in political or population centers, who chooses not to become an alien to the oldest and most immediate sources of human nurture, who chooses not to become a victim of nationalism -- such an artist must assert the region as microcosm -- this locust flowering, that hive by the Columbia -- and where do you live?
(written winter, 1986)
—William Carlos Williams
Here, it is morning now. Long dreaming drifts have laid their curves high and deep across the roads. Public power is still off. Not even the mailman or the paper carrier will make it through today. White shifting skiffs of snow still move over the fields flowing like currents over riverbed. I build up the fire again and the stovepipe begins to ping, the drafts wheeze, the fly ash circles softly upward, then disappears. Water for coffee heats on the stove. But for the skittish wind, there is no movement outside. I wait at the desk. Suddenly, a red-shafted flicker lights among the ice-glazed branches of the apple tree and begins to peck its way into a frozen core. I watch that black half-moon on its breast as it pecks, stops, a black shining eye cast upward, then pecks again. In the frozen field, the horses wait for their oats and alfalfa and I see the shapes of two pheasants by their feeders -- guo gi picking up the smallest kernels of grain. Everyone still sleeps. I close the draft and damper on the stove. The dog has finished her morning dance and whine and is ready to go out.
At the open door, I see the Blue Mountains darkened with pine, the lower slopes open, white, smooth. I remember my earliest crayon-scribbled pictures on that heavy paper from grade school: huge white mountains in the background, a foreground of trees on green hills, blue creek coming down, and in the center always a gabled house, smoke scrawling gray out the chimney, a few stick figures with hats. I think of my grandfathers and grandmothers in their coastal graves in the shadows of Mt. Rainier, of my wife and children in their inland beds asleep, of the Columbia waiting for all our lives to melt as this snow will soon. I go inside to the silence, surrounded by the old wood walls with openings to the light, openings leaking wind....
A region is a microcosm -- a magic circle centered on home. The values generated by that circle are many, but I have limited myself here to three -- confidence, wholeness, and intimacy. For me, the authentic map of the universe is composed of these microcosms -- a mosaic of specific human constructs crossing all abstract political, geographic, economic, and racial boundaries. This view of region as microcosm stands in contrast to the more dangerous metrocentric fantasy of region as province. When defined as province, region becomes an edge in a far remote place, a fragment of some empire with a far-away center. When the magic circle is defined as province, local life can be drained of significance, since only those who live at The Center are real. Thus, local intimacy, confidence, and wholeness are threatened. In contrast, region as microcosm enables an artist living anywhere -- including the Northwest -- to get work done, to achieve character, belief, aesthetic, purpose, and style. Region as province imposes a centralizing political and demographic metaphor which can artificially elevate the significance of artists who live in political or population centers, and artificially dismiss significant artistic achievements that are not centralized by non-artistic forces. An artist who chooses not to live in political or population centers, who chooses not to become an alien to the oldest and most immediate sources of human nurture, who chooses not to become a victim of nationalism -- such an artist must assert the region as microcosm -- this locust flowering, that hive by the Columbia -- and where do you live?
(written winter, 1986)
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A GALLON OF HONEY IN GLASS
Here -- a sweet stone to ride your shelf a lost summer given shape to last. Here -- what keeps guarded by stinging. This is your voice whispering "Home." Here, the perfect field is flowing against the bitter that winter brings. The specks of wax will hope to feel your slowly stare. Savor such light as your tongue can say. Thousands and thousands of shimmering lives have brought you love. Here is proof. Dip in your hands. (written summer, 1981) FISH FOSSIL
by Ai Qing (translated from the Chinese) The way you darted The way you leaped, shimmering From swell to swell Free to dive deep or swim Then, bad luck. The volcano? Ground swell? Some upheaval boomed. Your play and flash all smothered In evolutionary ash -- your tomb. Billions of years later A new federal assayer hammered Found you, life-like as ever In some remote dark stratum But you're hushed now Not even a breath Scales and fins all perfect Petrified, petrified. You're all inert Your give and taking gone No vision for sky or wave. An ear for surf left? None. Staring at just one piece of you Any numbskull can see that Arrested movement means Slow obscure hardening to death. The living need to strive To act, to move, go on Then die Like candlefish who burn, burn. from Songs for Coming Home (1980). Translated by George Venn and Lu Pei Wu, Changsha Railway University, Hunan Province, China, winter, 1982. Notes: A self-portrait, Ai Qing wrote “Fish Fossil” in 1977 after the fall of the Gang of Four when he was again allowed to return to Beijing after twenty years of exile and silence in Xinjiang. |
FORGIVE US...
Fifty years of your butchering art are here, Grandfather. I hear the crash of your falling ax into alder, the whisk of your keen knife on the blue steel while lambs and wethers bleat in the barn. They know your one quick stroke across their throats would make their ends the best you could create. I still don't like the blood, Grandfather, but I know now the need for meat. "Nothing should suffer," you said, and sought out old dying queens in hives and pinched their heads. Mensik's calf– you told us not to watch; bad dreams would come, you said, so we walked out and watched you anyway through a crack in the wall -- one deadly swing, no more -- from the spiking maul buckled the calf instantly to its knees on the hay. We knew your power then, and ran away. And now this God, Grandfather, this God whose songs you sang, whose church your worship built, whose book you read, whose name you never said in vain -- He's got you here in his shepherd's barn. Oh, he's a shoddy butcher, Grandfather. He's making you suffer his rusty dull deathknife for years, crippling your legs, then cutting off your speech to tremble, then tying you up in a manured bed. He won't bring you down with any grace or skill or swift humane strike of steel. Day after day, you sit in His hallway in your wheelchair and nurses walk by like angels and shout half your name. Ah, this God of yours, Grandfather, this God has not learned even the most simple lesson from the country of your hands. You should have taught him how to hone His knife, that the slaughtering of rams is the work of those brave enough to love a fast deft end. (written summer, 1977, Pushcart Prize, 1980 |