The Osprey

Today was the opening of the fishing season and I went into the shed and rigged up a rod with a lure and went down to the dock. I made some casts and thought about the better fishing that was over in the channel, and all the good spots that I had fished as a boy and young man. But I didn't have a boat to get over there and now someone else owned that property and it would be trespassing to walk onto it. So I continued to cast out into the very weed-less waters around the dock.

 

I could see I would not catch anything. There was no activity in the water. The lake was brown and dead. It was a late thaw for the ice and it had gone out only two weeks before. Spring had begun on the land and the birds were active and building nests and the trees were budding and the animals had returned from winter, but under the water the spring had not yet come. None of the underwater plants had started to grow. The water was still to cold. The fish were in some other place. They were not yet ready to spawn. I did not know where they were.

 

Across the lake I watched a great black bird soaring back and forth over the water. The bird was hunting the water for something. I saw the angle in his wing and his white head. It was an osprey. He must have been six feet across in the wings. The great osprey stopped in the air, flapping its wings dramatically, and held itself over the water, studying it. Then he soared high and dove, crashing through the surface of the water and then flapping out of the water, he soared along the height of the pines, hunting the lake.

 

The osprey had seen something. I didn't think there were fish yet but the osprey was hunting them. The osprey again hovered on beating wings and dove and crashed into the water and he came out and gliding low across the lake and towards me on the dock and soaring over me, I saw in his talons he had one, he had a fish. The osprey had caught one. It looked like a little perch. The osprey circled back and showed me again the perch he had caught and I watched him soar along the tree line and down the channel. For the great hunter the spring had come.

On Game & Feminism

Feminism and Game are similar programs in the sense they each offer their adherents the idea of becoming something they are not. Women: to become men. Men: to become alpha men.

Both make the same democratic assumption: that anyone can be anything they want to be.*

 

Both, to be successful, must make similar denials of fact.

 

For women to become men the idea of a man must first be whittled down. Through laws and social pressure men are made to be more feminine, making equality more attainable for women.

 

Likewise, average men must reduce the scope of the alpha male to make it attainable. Alpha is simply redefined as quality and quantity of sexual partners. In place of a conquering Alexander, there is now a snappily dressed man plying drinks and jokes to women in bars in exchange for sex.

 

The antagonism between the two programs is curious given that they essentially provide one another with what they are each looking for. The women: to be with a man who excites her like a natural alpha, but with none of the actual danger. The men: a larger pool of sexual partners who aspire to be as promiscuous as the most promiscuous men, thereby allowing him to pad his notch count and proclaim alpha status.

 

Indeed, in the natural alpha the two groups share a common antagonist. Both women and non-alpha men have throughout history been subject to his mistreatment and subjugation. It thereby comes as no surprise that both Game and Feminism flourish among the college educated middle class, a socio-economic class devoid of the natural alphas who are either oligarchs or outlaws.**

 

The natural alpha is a continuing reminder that not only are men and women not equals, but men cannot make themselves equal to other men either. Though the natural alpha is a fact of the species, the middle classes have little contact with him. It is not that the middle classes have banished or repressed him, it is that he has no interest or capacity to live among them. Cubicle jobs and working for others does not become him. Verily, as the middle class erodes economically the natural alpha will return to restore order in things, for he is drawn to danger and opportunity. Women will again assume their place as women, feminine and submissive, and selective in their sexual partners. And the game player, that Napoleon without an army, will be revealed as what he always was. In other words, just a short man.

 

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* There is something of the "blank slate" argument in it too, and arguably, in America, the anti-aristocratic aspects of the Horatio Alger myth.

 

** Today's Game-playing alpha lives in danger of encountering a natural alpha who calls his bluff and perhaps pulls his card.

The Hunt *

The Indian admired many animals for certain skills which he recognized were in excess of his own. The Indian saw in the wolf a great hunter who moved quietly throughout his lands and who cared and provided for his family and children, the old and the sick, and his pack. The Indian hunter sought the wolf's abilities and attempted to approximate them to provide for his family and his tribe. He observed the wolf closely and sought out the wolf's spirit to assist him in his own hunt, to help him to locate the animals. He wore the wolf's pelt and performed elaborate rituals to bring the wolf's spirit to him.

Western men do not admire animals. They look at animals and believe they can do nothing better then men. Animals cannot fix broken air conditioners, or perform accounting tricks, or operate jet airplanes. It is not just that most men only observe animals in zoos and not in natural settings. Men do not appreciate animals because there is nothing in animals for the animals to teach them.

Western man sees the animal either as a nuisance and something to be driven off, or sees only himself in the animal and calls the animal his equal and demands for it the legal protections of men. Neither perspective attempts to see the animal as it is in the animal world.

 

The animal that crosses his backyard and leaves its droppings, or that digs into his trash and makes a mess on his driveway, he wants that animal made to go away. He hires other men to do it and he feels that he has reasserted his control over his land, the land he has deed to.

 

The animal rights activist demands that the laws of men are applied for the animal's protection. He may refuse to eat animals and in some cases even attack other men and property to free or protect animals. To the activist the animal is as a man and to be treated no differently.

 

Curiously, among Western men, is it often the hunter, the killer of animals, who feels strongest for them and their protection. For it is the hunter unique among Western men who observes the animal in his animal world. There the hunter sees the animal as neither nuisance nor equal of man. The animal in his world is animal, and the hunter learns of both the animal and his animal world. The good hunter learns to see how the animal world is threatened and changed by Western man and he observes characteristics of the animal that he admires and may even acknowledge as being superior to those of men.

 

From Aldo Leopold to Teddy Roosevelt, it is no great coincidence that the men who have been most outspoken about the conservation and appreciation of the beauty and mystery of the undomesticated animal and land have also been its hunters. For these Western men through the hunt have come closest to understanding the animals as the Indian hunters did.

 

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* Now, of course, men define "the hunt" as the plying of drinks and jokes to women in bars as a means of procuring sex with them. These hunter-naturalists of urban nightlife call themselves "Players" and are said to practice a way of life known as "the Game." It is an indication of the darkness of this time that the author must counsel the reader against any interpretation of this post in the context of bars, nightclubs, coffee shops, and in any other setting women can be located and approached.

El Fin del Invierno

 

 

The Hundred Year Oak

The hundred year oak is gone.* It was rotted out and struck by lightning and the Inda boys came and cut it down and sawed it up. It is stacked in stove-sized pieces in the wood shed behind the cabin.

There is a big, new stump at the shore. But the hundred year oak remains. Even when the stump is gone I shall remember its place. The hundred year oak doesn't go away. Neither does the land go away, the land that you have known and lived on. The land is remembered. There is neither simply land then, nor simply memory. It happens if you are lucky to have lived in a place, really lived in it.

They cut down the hundred year oak, and it is still there. It is there just as my grandfather is there on the frozen lake when I pause while cutting a hole for fishing and in the morning quiet look down the channel at the sun coming up over the pines; it is there just as my grandmother is there walking the old path along the shore and pointing out the first shoots of skunk cabbage in the spring. Look down too for the marsh marigolds, she said. Look down to see the spring, she said. Look down.

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* Rings on the trunk date the oak at 157 years. The usual life of an oak tree is 80 to 100 years.

Fear The Gods

my iglu after the rain

 

1. The prideful man declares in what and in whom he believes. But the gods are only to be feared. What is mysterious and powerful and beyond men are facts he must simply accept. To believe is to impose upon the gods. Do not believe in gods. Fear them.

2. Understanding, even dignity, begins in fear.

3. Nuannaarpoq (Inuit): to take extravagant pleasure in being alive

Poetry from the Black Poet

A poem written for me by La Poeta Negro de Ibarra, Ecuador and my translation of it.

 

JESSE

Ignoto amigo, polen de luz
Libélula en lo que oida de polen de arrebol
Antorcha de enardecido viento es
Tu rebelde caballero de pensador
Tu corazón es una lágrima de lluvia
Que nadie mina caer

 

Tu pensamiento es perfecto, pero helado
Como las lenizas de la muerte
En los labios candorosas de la vida
No ames la filosofía
Ama el espejo triste y mustio
De los corazónes de los locos

 

Llena tus bolsillos de viento
Y tendras no la fealdad de las palabras
Y sera tuya
La impressible belleza perfecta del cielo.

 

JESSE

Undiscovered friend, pollen of light
Dragonfly that heeds the pollen of the setting sun
A torch of wind inflamed,
You noble rebel of thought
Your heart is a tear of rain
That no one can undermine to fail

Your thought is perfect, but cold
Like a game of death
On the outspoken lips of life
You love not philosophy,
But love instead the sad and cloudy mirror
Of the fool’s heart

Go fill your pockets with wind
And having no longer the ugliness of words
All shall be yours
The perfect, impressible beauty of the heavens.