Author: Marcelle Newbold

An autistic reflects on friendship with trees, lakes and certain birds

Margaret King

“Cantankerous and untrusting of people, he preferred the company of his cows, feeding them apples by hand and sleeping next to them….Woodward once had an ox named Old Duke who he taught to shake hands and roll over like a dog. ‘I loved him,’ Hall wrote, ‘and I could feel his affection for me.’”   — Steve Edwards, “Misunderstanding Thoreau: Reading Neurodiversity in Literature and in Life”

“When people were able to see trees or the sky, or hear birds, feelings of loneliness fell by 28%.”   — “Contact with nature in cities reduces loneliness, study shows,” The Guardian, 12/20/21

The lakeshore is beautiful in all seasons, even in the depths of winter. Even on the cloudy and rainy and stormy and especially the snowy days, it is beautiful because it is wild. Sometimes autistics have been thought of as feral people who have never been fully domesticated into our society.[i]

Mid-December, inching towards solstice, we walk back toward the light. Although I’m hundreds of feet above them, their voices carried at least half a mile offshore. I walked to the edge of the steep bluff, and there they were, far below–50 or so geese bobbing on the waves, talking. Were  they complaining about the weather? Or were they, like me, worshiping the sun that day?

How few people were out that day making their endless noise, or breathing fresh air, or listening to the crashing waves. A few small children screeched at a nearby playground, but their shrieks did not grate. Joyful sounds felt acceptable, and mingled with the waves and the geese. Although, there was a man walking a dog on that splendid Sunday, blasting a football game out of a radio as he walked. And there was another man, half a mile up, sitting on a bench overlooking the lake broadcasting angry, ranting talk radio, which seemed a poor choice and a profaning of the day. And then there was me, speech-to-texting this essay with the waves crashing below and the wind whipping all around, trying not to bother anybody, but perhaps, even I was committing some oblivious human blunder, disturbing a sleeping wood butterfly perhaps, with my musings.

If I tell people I consider certain trees, hummingbirds, the lakeshore, certain birds my friends, they might wonder if I have enough human friends–maybe, maybe not. All I know is that these living creatures are also my friends, and I feel close to them. Fellow humans might point out that friendship involves some sort of give and take. So what are trees and lakeshores and hummingbirds asking of me? It’s obvious they ask what any living thing asks for. To be noticed. To be seen and not judged. To be appreciated. I cannot think of a better definition of friendship, anyway.

Fellow humans may ask, “how do you know these creatures feel the same way about you?” I do not know for sure how they feel about me: but do you know for sure how the humans in your life feel about you? Studies show many of the people we consider our friends do not feel the same level of affection or attachment for us. Sometimes they don’t even feel reciprocal friendship for us at all.

I’m sure we’ve all been on both sides of that equation. 

Instinct tells me that the odds are as good with nature as they are with humans. Perhaps better.

It’s a risk I am willing to take.

—

[i]  See, for example, “Staying Autistic, Staying Feral” by Amy Gaeta 

Margaret King

A Flowing Drop Suspended In Time, Still Flowing

Daniel Rabuzzi

“The point is that all that is intermediate in the ordinary run of things is made immediate; which is what we mean when we say that breathing becomes breathless, hope becomes terror, or time stands still, but without any cessation, in any of these cases, of life, faith, or motion, and with an access of inward, of mutual verisimilitude.”

— R.P. Blackmur, “The Sacred Fount” (originally published 1942; reprinted in Blackmur, Studies in Henry James, edited with an introduction by Veronica A. Makowsky, New Directions 1983, page 60).

Decades ago:  a Green Heron hunts / hunted / is hunting in a half-strangled stream – a dwindled thread at the bottom of a drainage ditch – mere yards from a major intersection in Boston, Massachusetts. The blazing yoke of its eye!  The striations of its throat plumage (it must have been an immature), the delicate fronding of the feathers on its back as it leaned forward, coppery green plumes overlapping with the rusty brown, quiet subtle blazonry, imprinting themselves on the space between us. Crouching down among the reeds and minor willows crowding the culvert, my errand evaporated, I tracked the heron as it tracked fish, for many minutes…ten, fifteen, more, I did not know, so cannot remember the specific count, just the unbounded wholeness of the durée. The heron had been there always, picking its way over pebbles and twigs, when I appeared. I had always been there at the intersection as trucks roared by, when the heron manifested. The tableau of heron hunting flowed past me along a helical stream-bed. I became the moment, the heron, in the bedraggled stream; its “light, color, depth… awakens an echo in my body,” as Merleau-Ponty said about the workings of the eye and the mind.[i] The heron’s eye was / is / will be my eye, its minnow-hunger lodged also in my belly.

I have not lived in Boston for many years but I visit often and have, on occasion, passed that intersection. I always pause and look, hoping to catch another glimpse of a Green Heron there, professionally going about its business. I never have (not there, though often enough elsewhere), but I see always the palest tint of a shadow stalking down the little stream; I luxuriate in its “sense of presence and achronological pungency,” as Reinhart Koselleck described another multivalent episode.[ii] I smile and am for one prolongated moment in the past, while simultaneously also in the past-as-I-recreate-it, the present, the present-as-I-imagine-it-for-the-future, the future, and the future-in-which-I-am-remembering-my-recollection-of-the-original-event. A gaze, a gasp, a gesture that anchors itself in a place in the world, in the mind, in the world-as-the-mind-constructs-it, the heron was / is / will be ever-present in the water-tables of my mind. Time drops, unspools, concatenates. Drop-Time: when the Green Heron walks with delicate ferocity through my memory, picking a path in the present, already present in the future.  Drop-Time: when my mind is the Green Heron’s, a study in patience, a shape of hunting. Drop-Time: a surprise and an awakening, time hollowed out from the regular river, elongated and linked across the long stretches of current, directly tied like a bundle of leaves (or feathers) floating and bobbing and dipping in the stream. Drop-Time: in-collapsing and bursting outward at the same time, an imperfect progressive tense (the progressive implausible, the progressive heteroclite?), the aorist essence, passado no acabado, entanglements falling under the heading of what Carlo Rovelli calls “the inadequacy of grammar.”[iii]  The heron in the ditch by the intersection made / makes real the words of T. S. Eliot: “Time present and time past /Are both perhaps present in time future,/And time future contained in time past.” [iv] Unaware of Rovelli, of Eliot, uncaring of ontology or entropy, indifferent to chronotopes, the little Green Heron continues the hunt for darters along a tiny brook, then and now embodying and in our future embodied.

—–

[i]       Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen Johnson; translation by Carleton Dallery from 1961 original (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), page 125.

[ii]      Reinhart Koselleck,  Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, translation by Keith Tribe from 1979 original (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1990),  page 5.

[iii]    Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, translation by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell from 2017 original (NYC: Riverhead Books, 2018), pages 105-115.

[iv]     T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” in his Four Quartets (1936).

Daniel Rabuzzi

Bundles of Three

K. Gene Friedman

Curbside, daytime hazard lights delimit a polished log loitering parallel to parked cars, a personal injury lawsuit in repose; metal threaded through its pliant core like graphite bloating the gut of an analog pencil. The evenness and imagination of a lonesome Tinker Toy, I squat bedside to interrogate its destiny: a dry-cleaning ticket stapled to its spiral of years à la Paddington Bear’s duffle coat, wine cork toggles fastening, cardstock luggage tag dangling… Please look after…

Brierfield, Alabama—its origin, embryology, infancy. 2/50—its order, as if second in a run of fifty fine art prints, separated at birth, limited edition. PECO—its owner, a fledgling utility pole it is to be raised by a provider of electricity that falters in the sweat of droning accordion window units and slushy popsicles. Be mindful of your refrigerator door, your outlets to the external; conserve the pockets of cold you harbor.

Under late-stage capitalism, the A/S/L of West Philly’s Facebook group:

49th and Larchwood: lights flickering.
51st and Spruce: power back on.

 The scattershot shuffle of resource redistribution:

Anyone got space for me to store my insulin at?
Ready to dive!? Whole Foods employees hauling cases of freezer food out back.

An improbable journey—spanning seven states—to support an elevated highway of power lines. I envision the bedraggled tree: dismantled, decapitated, dismembered, filed to fit the geometry of the pencil box truck; claws clenching the sapped Southern soil. Its forty-nine siblings: stapled, seat belted into place. Flakey scales of grout brown and burnt sienna stripped off like guilty fingerprints; mummified corpses laid to rest along grimy West Philadelphian sidewalks.

The cultural anthropologist I’m dating, who will not be defined by labels, is taken by Pinus palustris, otherwise known as the longleaf pine—a species of evergreen distinguished by needles in bundles of three, its grisly history. Used as tar, pitch, and turpentine for naval ships; now, lumber for suburban development. Its once dominant community supplanted in shoulder-to-shoulder forests where wildfires cannot sweep to clear out competition.

Together, we locate Brierfield on his laptop screen, plus- and minus-sign in and out of the region, straddle a Google Earth satellite and soar. Our summer limbs stuck to the tattered sleeping bag sheeting his hand-me-down floor mattress. In the swampy, second-story bedroom where he will not avail of A/C. Out of deference to bug mating calls, the harmonic convergence of male and female mosquito flight tones.

Below: a bounty of Baptist churches, forests identified as plantations, a coal mine museum catalogued in the Register of Landmarks & Heritage. Clouds of Pine canopies looming on slanted thickets like crooked rain. The dense grids of wooden pegs, planted to be plucked from the land, reminding of the solitaire boards that occupied me as an only child at a family-style restaurant in Nowhereville, Pennsylvania. Where the owners had likely tired of replenishing snapped crayons, tear-off placemats: probably also of Alabama—their embryology, infancy.

K. Gene Friedman