Meandering

Charles Dickens starts David Copperfield with a description of the hero's birth*.  He immediately gets distracted into a discussion of the neighborhood women's forecasts about his life.  Then he briefly gets back to his birth mentioning that he was born with a caul and then goes off again suggesting that people believed cauls prevented drowning,  and that the woman who bought his caul died in bed at age 92.

I have understood that it was, to the last, her proudest boast that she never had been on the water in her life except upon a bridge and that over her tea (to which she was extremely partial) she, to the last, expressed her indignation at the impiety of mariners and other who had the presumption to go "meandering" about the world.  It was in vain to represent to her that some conveniences tea, perhaps included, resulted from this objectionable practice.  She always returned, with greater emphasis and with an instinctive knowledge of the strength of her objection, "Let us have no meandering."

Not to meander myself, at present, I will go back to my birth.

We're only at page 2 of David Copperfield at this point and more than half of what Dickens has written so far is 'meandering' from the story of his birth.  Which I take as a signal that most of the book will be meandering.


I was struck by this note on meandering because I'm sure that some people might accuse me of meandering on this blog.  But I'm persuaded that the only true stories are told through meandering along all the side paths of the main story.  Otherwise, you have knowledge of just one path, but not about the woods through which it, dare I say, meanders.

You may notice this post comes after a post on haiku.  In hindsight, I would say the post was NOT about haiku, as I hinted at in the last three lines.  Rather it was about the structure of haiku and not the art of haiku.  I realized that as I was doing it - having checked a site on haiku and realizing I was focused on the form and leaving out the essence.  So I was both flattered and chagrined to have the haiku artist whom I mentioned in passing suggest where I might learn more about the art of haiku.  Michael Dylan Welch's link to Becoming a Haiku Poet beautifully distinguishes between what I wrote about - three lines of 17 syllables - and haiku.

He tells us that haiku is about capturing a mood using objective images, about being subtle, indirect.  And I was merely using the structure to force myself to get to the essence of a thought, to NOT meander.

Haiku, if I understand Welch, has a special purpose. It's about conveying a feeling.  It's not about summarizing an argument.  Thank you Michael for being gentle on me and for writing so well about haiku.  Using three lines of 17 syllables does not make a haiku. 

That said, using 17 syllables in three lines now and then to force oneself to distill the point of one's argument isn't a bad idea.  But a 17 syllable (and for those of you who didn't take the time to read Welch's post, let me say that he says that one shouldn't sacrifice natural English to stick to 17 syllables)  synopsis of a more complex tangle of thoughts is something like a bumper sticker aphorism.  It works for people who already think the way you do.  But it frustrates if not infuriates those who think differently.

Meandering, wandering here and there through the woods, NOT sticking to the main path that goes from the parking lot to the peak, is how you get to know those woods.  Through Dickens' meandering  readers get more than a plot.  They get all the blood and muscles and fat.  They get the smell of perfume mixed with sweat, the texture of the underwear, and color and style of the outerwear.  Not just the bare bones. 

A good poem, a good haiku, evokes a feeling the reader has experienced through imagery the reader knows.  Possibly a great haiku can transport readers beyond their personal experiences. A good essay evokes an understanding of an issue the reader hadn't already understood, through synthesizing points the reader hadn't yet organized or articulated in this particular pattern.

I think.   Though, of course, I'm mindful that ultimately feeling trumps reason.  So the effective essay needs also to connect to the readers' feelings. 



*Actually, Dickens starts by questioning whether David will even be the hero.  ["Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life . . . these pages must show."]

Why Do Haiku?

Haiku Structure

The first line five beats

The second line seven beats

The third five again.

The Basics

One two three four five

One two three four five six sev

One two three four five

Why Do Haiku?

Haiku forces me

To eliminate all but

The bare essentials.

Haiku Content

Japanese haiku

Has reference to seasons at

End of the second line.

About Rules

In English Haiku

Rules need not be so strict, read

Michael Dylan Welch

Bad Haiku

After reading Welch

I almost hit the delete

Sorry Mister Welch.

[Update June 15:  The next post follows up on this one.] 

Winter Art

Ice Christoed Anchorage

the fog's cold fingers touched all
with white winter glaze

 

 

 

 

Then last night snow came

redecorating the trees

fluffy, soft, and light

Christo

Cicadas in the Background

The last week or two has been highlighted by the sound of cicadas in the background more often than not. A particularly loud spot is the hill along the south side of Wat Umong where I recorded this clip as I rode to work.

Click on the yellow button with the black arrow to hear the cicadas. Cicadas by AKRaven


I'm not sure how this will come out on your computer, but use speakers or ear phones and put the volume up to get a good sense of this. J estimates that they are at least 70 decibels when they are loud. At the moment, they are silent.



Here's a picture from ChangThai.com (Chang means elephant in Thai)







Cicada Central adds this information (plus a lot more on their site)

Cicadas are probably best known for their conspicuous acoustic signals or "songs", which the males make using specialized structures called tymbals, found on the abdomen. Female cicadas do not have tymbals, but in some species the females produce clicking or snapping sounds with their wings. Some males augment their tymbal sounds by making winc clicks as well. After mating, females lay eggs in grass, bark or twigs; the eggs hatch later in the season and the new nymphs burrow underground. As juveniles and adults, cicadas use piercing and sucking mouthparts to feed on the xylem fluid of plants. All but a few cicada species have multiple-year life cycles, most commonly 2-8 years. In many species, adults can be found every year because the population is not developmentally synchronized; these are often called "annual" cicada species. By contrast, the cicadas in a periodical cicada population are synchronized, so that almost all of them mature into adults in the same year.

Lee Chang-kook, in an informative, but also very human, article in the Korea Times, writes:

We know what cicadas look like. They are large bugs with two transparent wings. The male cicadas make a loud, shrill and droning noise by vibrating two membranes on their abdomens.

It is generally believed that they spend many years as larvae underground (some say 15 years, some 12, and some seven) and live a sadly short life (some say only 15 days, some a month, and some three months) and die, but most of the important knowledge we have about cicadas is no more than just inaccurate and commonplace hearsay. Nothing is fixed, verified or proven.

And, do you know that they eat nothing during their entire life? Indeed, through my long experience in watching them I have not found any of them trying to catch anything to eat or eating something.

I wonder if they have a mouth at all. I wonder how can they sing so energetically all the time without eating anything at all. No doubt they are the greatest singers in the world. They sing to death. It is said that dew is the only food for them.

You can get the whole fascinating article at the Korea Times link above.



If you want to learn and hear more about Thai Cicadas you can buy a copy of

Cicadas of Thailand Vol. 1 by Michel Boulard

With Audio CD

The first of two volumes on Thai cicadas, the most fascinating and also least known representatives of a family of sonorous insects. Cicadas neither sing, nor stridulate, but tymbalize. The volume reveals the existence and the double life, larval and imaginal, of cicadas encountered during six years of research in Thailand's sub-mountainous forests. The body of the text includes two chapters discussing general characteristics, acoustic and procreative ethology, and exceptional or enigmatic aspects and behaviour. The text is enriched by drawings and photographs, mostly of living insects. It is accompanied by a CD comprising forty cicada sound productions (or tymbalizations), the acoustics made visual in ID and ethological cards, which form an original feature of this pioneering study.

And finally, Club ALC offers some cicada haiku. I liked this one by Robert Leechford:

a cicada emerges
from years of silence
singing and singing

Lotus

The petals open
Softly glowing, too soon gone
Like the setting sun

Tamarind (Macaam) and Rose Apple (Chompoo)

I've had some of the tamarind มะขาม pictures since the Petchabun trip where we bought them at the orchard. After the meeting in Petchabun, we drove to Ping's family's house which is also in Petchabun, about 40 minutes away. Ping took several us down the road to a tamarind orchard - above - where we bought three kilo bags of fresh, ripe tamarind seeds for 100 Baht (about $3) (below.) The link says what Thais have told me - the best tamarind comes from Petchabun.

Tootsie roll chewy

Tamarind dark, tangy taste
Hiding big brown seeds























These seeds look big, but remember, five or six are inside each 'fruit'. I'd say they were adult molar size. Imagine if we had dark brown teeth. Then everyone would think white teeth would look strange.

These are serious seeds, beautiful in their own right, begging to be used again. Necklace? Monopoly pieces? You could display a grain of rice on one. Or miniature toy blocks. Too beautiful to throw away. You could even plant them and grow trees. [Update: Click to see the seedlings we got from a few of these seeds.]











The Chompoo. A drink you can eat. So full of liquid fruit. Wet like a watermellon with the texture of a solid bell pepper. Cold Chompoo on a hot day. You couldn't ask for more.


The Chompoo , called Rose Apple by some in English. Chompoo (ชมพู่) sounds a lot like the word for 'pink' in Thai, but the tone for 'poo' is different.

Infamous Lake Otis and Tudor and the Moon

Worst intersection
in the city. Moon sliver
makes traffic ok.

Cottonwood

Northern summer sun
Warms fragrant green cottonwoods
Soft snow covers ground