A Network of Lines That Intersect

Sometimes I surprise myself by not being able to read a map as well as I usually can. Like Bilbo Baggins, I love maps - there's a stack of maps on a shelf in my room, along with a collection of rolled-up Green Trails topo maps resembling old scrolls. But on Saturday morning, in Tryon Creek State Park, I found myself at a crossroads of trails that had me thinking of Calvino's chapter title from "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler." And no matter how long I stared at the map, my sense of direction was just as deliciously skewed as it was when I first read Calvino.

Needless to say, I figured it out eventually, and took the trail running along the creek. A year ago last fall, I took a Portland State class that taught children about the outdoors by leading them on hikes in this park. It was an incredible experience, but I hadn't been back since. Now, walking through the winter woods, I found a peculiar mix of old and new, and a strange sense of place.

Old and familiar, because I remembered some of the fun places in the park we would show the kids: the hollow cedar stump you can crawl into, the squirrel's nests, the bridges over the clear rushing stream, the nurse logs and the evidence of logging. New and unfamiliar, because the underbrush and deciduous trees were bare and empty, and the trails less crowded.

One of our assignments was to hike the trails, learn the landmarks, and build a plant journal to help us identify species for the kids. The forest then was thick with leafy elderberry, currant, thimbleberry, and vine maple. Now, moss, licorice fern, and Oregon grape rule the understory, and the shadows of bare branches darken the ground like vines. The forest is more open with the understory thinned. The light is clear and more pure, somehow; the distances between the trees and across the creek seems much greater. I looked across these spaces and thought about how the distances in our own lives seem that much vaster in winter. Yet, these distances aren't empty - they're pregnant. "In the depths of winter," Camus wrote, "I found within me an infinite summer." Life isn't waiting; though imperceptible to our senses, it's moving and growing. We just have to slow down to see it.

After a year, and in a different season, I was reminded what makes this urban state park so great: it has something to teach everyone. Nature is not dead, in winter; it just wears a different fashion. And the trails, though not steep, still climb and fall enough to force a negotiation in balance and perspective. The morning light on the cottonwoods, and the glowing mossy limbs of maple, are enough to make you smile. And in those moments of silence after something falls from a tree or stamps a warm-blooded foot in surprise, you can pause and listen to the trees creak in the wind. You can listen to the birds. You can listen to your breathing, and to the beating of your own heart.

The Musical Illusionist, by Alex Rose

This is a strange little volume of interconnected stories, published by a very small imprint of a small press. The book has grand designs: it consciously echoes Borges’ labyrinths and invented worlds, and it bears a strong resemblance to Calvino’s “Invisible Cities.” Yet, it stands alone, in the tradition of those authors, and not as a copy.

Rose uses a subway-ride through an imaginary “Library of Tangents” to connect his fictional histories of bizarre texts, silent languages, sensory illusions, mechanical and physical inventions, wonderful microbes and rare neurological disorders. Fact mixes with fiction in imaginative ways that ring true while simultaneously sounding like essays in code. His range is wide, from early Catholic gospels to cryptology, from Aristotelian philosophy to quantum physics, from Arabic algebra to renaissance scientists, from Freud to Feynman to Dada to Wagner to forgotten countries peopled with strange tribes practicing impossible customs and remaining hidden, somehow, from history. It all works, although some stories work better than others. “Book of Glass” and “Waldemar” are among the best, although as the reader progresses through the texts, intertextual similarities and connections begin to appear. When the final story draws to a close, it refers the reader back to one of the beginning stories, in a sort of infinite loop that should be expected, but isn’t.

I also enjoyed the color reproductions of old texts, maps, sketches, and graphs; they added to the verisimilitude and atmosphere.

This was a quick read, and that is both good and bad. I wanted some of these stories to be longer, more detailed, more developed. Others didn’t interest me so much, and I was fine with reading them and moving on. But now, having finished the book (almost in one sitting), I want to reread it and look for more connections and to try to discover more of the interior structure of the book. This is a great work of imagination. There’s more here than first appears, and it’s well worth investigating.

I’d recommend it to readers who appreciate Borges and Calvino, but also history, science, and liberal arts; book making and history; linguistics and philosophy. Virtually all topics are interwoven into The Musical Illusionist. It is a beautiful little book, not quite up to Borges or Calvino, but passionate in the same vein, and eager in the same passion.

Under a Flaming Sky, by Daniel James Brown

In 1894, several wildfires in Minnesota merged into a massive conflagration that killed hundreds, obliterated several towns, and destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres of land. Hot, dry weather conditions were ideal for fires, and the detritus of logging—acres of clear-cut, slash, stumps, and brush—made it all but inevitable that a large fire would burn out of control. Brown focuses on the town of Hinckley and its residents to dramatize a natural disaster that is all but unknown today.

Brown’s account is harrowing, jaw-dropping, and impossible to put down. He describes a recent forest-fire in Idaho to illustrate how a fire grows into a massive conflagration that can explode hillsides of timber, create self-sustaining weather patterns of high winds and huge convection updrafts, build walls of flame hundreds of feet high, send clouds of explosive gas in advance of the flames, and produce an energy output equivalent to Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs exploding every fifteen minutes. In comparison to the Idaho fire, the Hinckley fire was size times larger, faster, and more destructive.

Brown approaches the science on a basic level, just enough to weave the facts into the human drama as the fire engulfs thousands of acres and burns through Hinckley and other towns in a matter of hours. The fire approaches so rapidly that the town is caught unawares; the size of the fire is unknown and people attempt to fight it, to save their possessions, or wait too long to flee. Families are separated, trains race through flames and over burning bridges, individuals meet horrifying deaths in cellars, wells, swamps, and fields, and lumber yards, buildings, and rail ties explode and burn to ash and molten steel. Brown researched eye-witness accounts to leave no doubt about the horror survivors experienced, from towering walls of flame and acrid smoke advancing faster than a man can run to the terror of standing in a lake, surrounded by fire, isolated from loved ones and suffering from burns and exhaustion. There are scenes in this book that make fictionalized horror seem tame. This was real: people watched as their loved ones literally collapsed and burst into flame, or listened as people roasted alive, their screams altering pitch as superheated air burned their vocal chords.

How Brown kept the pace through the first two-thirds is a mystery to me. I read it too fast. Unfortunately, the pacing slows as the fire dies down and recovery operations begin. The horror isn’t over: hundreds are dead, many bodies are nothing but ash and completely unidentifiable, families are devastated, entire towns destroyed, livelihoods and possessions lost forever. The state and nation offer assistance, but in the long run, the status quo prevails. The timber industry wasn’t regulated, medicine couldn’t offer effective burn treatment, and there was no such thing as post-traumatic counseling. People simply started over, a quiet heroism that doesn’t carry as much emotional weight as the passages describing the fire itself.
That doesn’t matter, in the end. Brown avoids direct conclusions in his effort to explore the fire and its legacy (his own grandfather survived the fire). Nevertheless, history repeats itself, and quiet heroism will always be the hallmark of natural disaster, no matter how technologically advanced we become. As I write this, thousands are evacuating the burning hills around San Diego; many will lose their homes. Every summer it is the same. Presaged by the Peshtigo and Chicago fires, the Hinckley fire was itself only one of many devastating fires that summer and over the following years. Despite advances in fire science, conservation, logging practices, medicine, and counseling, we still hold ourselves superior to nature, and so nature will continue to test our pride, our arrogance, and our will—and it will always win.

Writing the World: Understanding William Stafford, by Judith Kitchen

What you gain from this retrospective critical assessment of William Stafford is a sense of what you’ve missed reading his poetry, even if you’ve read him extensively. I’ve read many of his essay collections and the beautiful memoir by his son, Kim. The overall idea these volumes suggest is that Stafford’s prolific output was closer in origin to Kerouac’s legendary, and perhaps false, “First thought, best thought.” Stafford’s poetry is far more complicated than a quick reading indicates, and reading this criticism makes it clear that Stafford paid great attention to his poems, despite his assertions that he didn’t revise much, and let the poem arrive slowly, on its own terms, and almost fully formed.

The fact is that Stafford did allow this to happen, but his ear, his inner vision, and his sense of the “truth” of a poem were simply precursors to a finely tuned end product. In almost every line, there is something happening; every verse is the way it is because Stafford made it that way; every volume he published was designed; and the whole of his work is remarkably consistent in terms of language, theme, and artistic vision.

In other words, reading this book changed the way I read Stafford. I’m compelled to revisit old favorites and dive into poems that I’d previously skimmed over. If you haven’t read Stafford, do so now – he’s one of the finest American poets of the last century, and a great place to begin is “The Way It Is.” And take the time to let each poem settle in. Read them aloud. Think about every word, and then read this book. Stafford is never vague or ambivalent, and yet he questions, doubts and leaves much to the imagination. He does make powerful statements, but even in those poems, there’s always more to discover.

Borges on Writing, by Thomas di Giovanni

It may be worth your while to skip this book about Borges and just read Borges. But that wouldn’t be very Borgesian, and there are a few interesting ideas to be found here. Unfortunately, even the line by line analyses of poems and stories fails to reveal much about Borges as a writer, except to show that he writes much like everyone else does (or should): carefully, with great attention to detail, and with immense forethought.

The best parts of this book are the discussions of translation. Borges modeled his Spanish on English, which made his Spanish seem esoteric, and his translations into English more difficult. Many translators and translations are discussed, but because di Giovanni was Borges’ personally selected translator, their discussions are particularly insightful.

I wish, however, that the material chosen for discussion had been different. I’m not so knowledgeable about Borges’ poetry, since the woman I loaned the book to absconded with it to Mexico (true story). But the fiction? I wish they’d discussed “The Shape of the Sword…”