Swarms

Swarms, swarms
everywhere
birds, toads
the swarms
of bees
of ants
of thoughts
that something is
not right

Recasting Alice

This is a poem that started out as a Twitter post, but grew into something quite different. I offer it to you with all due apologies to Lewis Carroll, whose Alice I've always admired and whose credit I've repaid poorly here.

My Alice
By Francis Scudellari

Her short, wintry youth,
a fair tale's ending
she windy followed
at the blue-white tip
of a buttoned nose
reaching this fine point
to a bent-fork path
where she stands, then sits
on the glassy edge
of iced-over pond
and looks less than dives
in, to grow unfrocked
by wonders re-versed

Immaterial
things, once-thought, awkward,
perhaps too-weighty,
are pulled thin, stretched tall
and golden snake give
her skeletons form,
a key gently grasped
that she inward turns
unclocking spun minds
to lithely chime up,
out of darkly twists
where they holey lay
fixed, for her "so-long"

Two Souls: Flabby mimics

After the last long-winded and prosaic post about the movie FRESH, a return to sparser verse and the next installment of my poem Two Souls. I may yet however revisit the idea of "monocultures" within a different context.

Two Souls, Twin Lives
By Francis Scudellari

V. Flabby mimics

She-he, un-mated flames
half to fading,
slip on fatted layers,
flabby mimics
of trees' up-craning trunks,
pained limbs that twist
when ten bony barbs burst
through soft pink nubs,
new claws they file against
rough-surfaced stones
to climb the greening heights,
feast on sweet-meats,
and sugary speed the cycles

FRESH: Return farming to its roots

Last night, I had the pleasure of watching a thought-provoking new food documentary: FRESH by ana Sofia joanes. There are two characteristics that make the film particularly interesting.

First, there is its depiction of a new breed of farmers from around the country who combine the latest technology with age-old farming techniques in trying to combat industrialization and bring some sanity back to the way we produce our food.

Second, there's the fact that the film currently lacks a distributor and showings of it are being organized at a grass-roots level by community members who have been energized around the new food politics through movies like Food, Inc. and books such as The Omnivore's Dilemma (authored by Michael Pollan, who is featured in the film).

Here in my Rogers Park neighborhood, the film was shown to a packed house at the No Exit Cafe, a venue known more for its musical theater performances. The collection of both already committed food activists and the more recently mobilized information seekers, were drawn to the event thanks largely to promotion done on social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook.

The film's appeal definitely lies in its hopeful message. Early on, we meet Joel Salatin whose father rejected the best advice of both government and corporate agricultural experts about how to best increase productivity on the over-exploited, cheap plot of land he had bought. He instead pursued methods of farming that were informed by Nature's own patterns, rather than bottom-line calculations and economies of scale.

One of the images that stuck with me from the film's opening is Salatin watching over a hog as it joyfully rolls in the mud to cool off. Contrast that with the penned-in pigs of industrial farms, which are kept in such close-quarters that they have to have their tails snipped off.

Carrying on in his father's footsteps, Salatin tells us how he allows his animals to express their natures; or as he describes it, a cow's "cowness" and a chicken's "chickenness." Cows, being herbivores, are meant to graze on grass (not grain mixed with animal byproducts) and they're also meant to do so while being constantly herded (not stuck in stalls). Chickens have beaks and claws in order to root through the fields seeking out larvae for food.

In keeping with those Nature-given qualities, Salatin runs his cows over grasslands and then brings the chickens in after them to peck over the herd's leavings. He describes how this labor "honors" the chickens, giving them a valuable role in the life of the farm beyond the laying of eggs. It certainly benefits them (and us the consumer) much more than the cramped cages and beak-removal they experience at most industrial-scale farms in the United States.

Pollan picks up on the point of our unnatural food practices by discussing the concept of "monocultures." He points out that Nature dislikes a lack of variety in species, which has become the norm in our agriculture. In fact, the plagues of pests and disease that afflict such production can be directly attributed to Nature's attempts to defeat the monocultures that our industrial farms create by planting undifferentiated crops on wides swaths of land and by housing the same breeds of animals in over-crowded complexes.

This gives the truth to the lie that farming needs these pesticides and antibiotics in order to increase productivity. They actually rely on the chemicals in order to maintain their unnatural practices, and to feed the bottom lines of the large corporations who sell them, and the others that profit from single-species production. Such a system also turns animal waste into a pollutant, rather than the nutrient it is in an organic cycle, creating an unnecessary social cost.

There are other hidden costs built into our industrial methods of farming, such as driving down the wages of the workers involved at all levels of production and decreasing the nutritional value of the food sold. Not only are these practices unsustainable, but we learn later in the film that statistics actually show mid-sized organic farms to be more productive than their industrial counterparts.

This just touches the surface of the interesting people and ideas you'll discover in the film; another is Will Allen, who runs Growing Power, Inc. in Milwaukee where he tries to win new converts to sustainability by demonstrating the benefits of composting and urban farming.

To experience it all for yourself, see the documentary. You can find out where it's playing, and how to organize a local showing, by visiting the Fresh the movie Website.

Io, Mid-transformation

This is the second illustration I've done for my poem Argus & Io. It depicts the nymph Io as both woman and cow. I like the way I interpreted her bovine side much better.

Newspapering, and self-promotion

As I may have mentioned on this blog before, I've been working with some friends to get a small newspaper off the ground here in Rogers Park, the Chicago community where I live. We're still growing and improving after 7 months of learning on the job.

In the current issue, which hits local newsstands tomorrow but is on the Web now, I contributed an essay of sorts that I find quite amusing (yes, shameless self-promotion to follow). It deals with the joys of jury duty and draws from my literary past. It's called One Day, One Trial, One Bounced Check. Here's a small taste, but please do read the whole thing if you find the tease worthy:

On a crisp early morning last April, I made the trek down to the Daley Center to perform a civic duty that fills most Chicagoans with more dread than pride. I had been summoned by the Court to sit through a process of jury selection that seems patterned after the most angst-inspiring metaphors of our best existential writers.

Our County of Cook has christened its system “One Day, One Trial” based on the fact that you need to endure either a single day of rejection or the more dire sentence of empaneling on a single trial’s jury. The solitariness of the moniker is fitting, as the whole experience engenders feelings of isolation and anxiety.

Two Souls: New Hair

Continuing on where my poem Two Souls takes me, this is the fourth installment. I've decided to subtitle each part. In case you haven't been following along, the first three parts are I. Exile, II. Slow Drift, and III. Fleshy.

Two Souls, Twin Lives
By Francis Scudellari

IV. New Hair

On nests spread far between
parallel paths
These two of never's name,
a restless lie,
let time's shortened shadow
fall across bald,
scaled shoulders, its darkness
seeding new hair
and cunning to endure
seasons become
changeling, drawn to leafy coves
where they gobble
shoots that taste of lost light

Two Souls, Fleshy Promises

This is the third installment of my latest poem, which I think may grow past my initial imaginings. The developing story is gaining complexity in my mind.

Two Souls, Twin Lives
By Francis Scudellari

III.

Then removed, with miles lapsed,
separate sames
each stubby-leg crawl up
on greening clumps
of floated rock and root
that warm harbor
creatures also exiled,
bumping along
blindly to seek their like,
prodded past sleep
by hints of shapeless eterns
traded for fleets
of fleshy promises

The illusion of time

Catching up on my New Yorker reading, I came across a passage from Salman Rushdie's wonderful short story In the South that held particular resonance within the context of my previous post on Biocentrism. I'm likely assigning it a different meaning than the author intended, but regardless of that, it's a lovely piece of writing.

In the front yard they paused briefly by the golden-shower tree that stood there. They had watched it grow from a tiny shoot to its present sixty-foot grandeur. It had grown quickly, and, though they did not say so, this rapid growth had disturbed them, suggesting, as it did, the speed of the passing of the years. The Indian laburnum: that was another name for it, a name among many names. It was konrai in their own, southern language, amaltas in the tongue of the north, Cassia fistula in the language of flowers and trees. “It has stopped growing now,” Junior said, approvingly, “having understood that eternity is better than progress. In the eye of God, time is eternal. This even animals and trees can comprehend. Only men have the illusion that time moves.”

Briefly back to the philosophical

Interrupting my in-progress poem Two Souls, I want to make a more-than-mental note of a couple ideas brought to my recent attention. Each hearkens me back to the series of posts I began a few months ago (and unfortunately dropped due to distractions) regarding the necessity for a new 21st Century Ethos.

I'll try to incorporate both into the continuation of that discussion, which I hope to pick up again very soon.

First, there's a very interesting article in June's Wired Magazine, which features a discussion of the New New Economy. The article is called "The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online." Its title is sure to provoke a negative response from Americans who for sixty years have been taught to recoil at the mere mention of the "S" word. Getting beyond that first reaction, it's very much worth reading for its examination of the new forms of social media and how they are creating a greater tendency toward and preference for collaboration and collective action.

The next idea that caught my fancy is the concept of Biocentrism that a friend referenced in a Tweet last week. Below is a passage pulled from Wikipedia that lays out the main points, but I encourage you to read the full article on Biocentrism:

According to Robert Lanza biocentrism has seven principles.

1. What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. An "external" reality, if it existed, would by definition have to exist in space. But this is meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind.

2. Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.

3. The behavior of subatomic particles, indeed all particles and objects, is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.

4. Without consciousness, "matter" dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.

5. The structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. The "universe" is simply the complete spatio-temporal logic of the self.

6. Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.

7. Space, like time, is not an object or a thing. Space is another form of our animal understanding and does not have an independent reality. We carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life.

Two Souls, Exhausted

This is the second part of my latest in-progress poem. I finished composing it while sleep-deprived, so it may not make much sense.

Two Souls, Twin Lives
By Francis Scudellari

II.

Their arced escape route etched
with quick silver
on velvet, ends tap'ring
to finger tips
that will trace a path back
one day, but now's
distance exhausted, they
splash in blue soup,
swirled till cooled in a cup
of moth'ring clay,
and, nourished on forgetting,
grow buoyant limbs
to slowly drift apart

Two souls, at first birthing

This is the first part of a poem that I'm currently working on. I'm not yet sure how large it will become, but I'm expecting at least three more parts. 

Two souls, twin lives
By Francis Scudellari

I.

Two souls, twin lives conceived
and long dwelling
within the mingling storm
of light and dust
that delicate danced 'round
goddess sisters'
gaseous split-crown heads
until cast out,
paired molten tears spit-shed
in the blinking
of ageless eyes, not angry
but grown weary
with the weight of shared lids

Many-eyed giant

This is my attempt to depict Argus, although I'm quite a few eyes short. I think that I erred on the silly side with this one.

720 Clocks, in full measure

This is the full poem that I teased in my last post. It's a long one, which I'll use as my excuse for it taking some time to finish. Please let me know if you can easily understand what's going on in the narrative.

720 Clocks
By Francis Scudellari

Seven hundred nineteen
clocks plus one new-bought she
loving cups in pale hands
before it takes its time-
saved place among pieces
atop two dozen shelves--
blond-skinned particle board
framed by squat book cases
that dust-free stand before
her, patient for this day

Clocks with wood-grain finish,
cased chrome, or dyed plastic;
topped with never clanked bells
or kid's cartoon figures--
an endlessly spun chase
round faces, oval, square
her favorite tight sealed
within black cat's belly;
tick-waved paw, twitch-tocked tail
each short minute stroking

It's a lucky number
A very special time
When you can make a wish
For anything you want, and
it will come true , some day...

The mothering low words
circling back, she surveys
her measures collected
for four and twenty years
stretching from right to left
Each now properly wound,
batteries freshly charged
to call up magic twice
this day, filling it full
of her wished for minutes

Whether old-time displayed
by mismatched bandy lengths--
pointed, ornate, and spare
that sweep ever forward
through inward notched halos;
or mechanical marked
between flipping black tiles;
or more modern counted
by re-posed bits of eight
light arranged from behind

Oh. But is it the time
that's very magical,
or the sight of numbers
all lined up, standing tall,
each pointing at the sky?

Her childish answer swings
upon her as she twists
the gray ridged, clicking knob
of the purchased blue cube
set one minute before
its right-neighbor to form
a well-tuned chorus of
seven hundred twenty
clocks to barbed-ripple read
eleven: eleven

This last one pushed into
its first awaiting slot
she sits, slow scans the shelves,
a day's worth of wishes;
the same whispered, wanting
words that she will repeat
one thousand, four hundred
forty times, in constant
chanted hope for lives lost
by four and twenty years