A Florsheim or an Ovenbird: Choose Your Weapon

The initial entry in this blog employed the 'avian conceit' - climate change is forcing birds around the globe to seek a diminishing habitat, just as I, entering geezerdom and an enforced retirement, am feeling more and more like the gray-headed bush shrike pictured here, i.e., not exactly perky, head down, wondering what shoe is next to fall.

 

 "Waiting for Florsheim"

Apropos of this lapse (or flight, if you prefer) into metaphysical poesy and the Donnesean conceit, a friend sent me Robert Frost's "The Ovenbird," seeing my conceit and upping me one, explaining that she'd been feeling more like her bird than like my bird. Frost's own conceit was as nothing to his avian conceit:
  

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would sing and be as other birds,
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
is what to make of a diminished thing.

It strikes me that this bird's inquiry, by Frost's account, anticipates my own in composing these literary bijoux:  "The question that he frames in all but words / is what to make of a diminished thing."  Or at least could be taken as anticipating the same.  I'm of two minds about it.

(It may have occurred to you, in a random moment or a feverish attempt to orient yourself, that reading a blog about birds and poetry is a little bit like watching replays of Ernie Kovacs' poet laureate and proto-homosexual Percy Dovetonsils. What, you may well ask, am I letting myself in for? I assure you, nothing further from my mind.)
 

 Percy Dovetonsils, Poet Inebriate

There is inevitably a diminishment in such change, the passing of what was in itself good and pleasurable. Leaves fall, pear blossoms perish, summer becomes autumn, the passage of everything fragile and ethereal, including life for that matter. It's the Heraclitean eye, but only by half. You can't step into the same river twice. But that's half-true really, because it is the same river, just with different water in it. It's important to see what Heraclitus saw, that change is a cycle that comes around, that there are wheels within wheels. We see it as diminishment because sometimes we just don't have the time allotted to see what comes around, to appreciate the continuity in it.  The change itself, as Heraclitus understood it, was the continuity of things, the tension of opposite forces that makes everything collapse and reconvene. So the ovenbird sees only half the picture. It's the poor sod waiting for the Florsheim to drop on him who probably won't be disappointed.  But he's only half right as well, since if he gets beaned it's only because he didn't get out of the way. Waiting isn't what he should have been doing.


No, rather than taking things as diminished, there is the other approach as instanced in the post-Romantic raving of Dylan Thomas which I will not quote at length ("wise men, wild men, good men, grave men, etc.") except  the immortal choral postlude:

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light .

Or, throw the shoe back. 

Shoes Worth the Wait

Heading for High Ground

Today the New York Times carries a story about climate change and the growing threat of wildlife extinctions, around the globe but particularly in the tropics, where animals like birds just can’t move a few hundred miles north, or a few hundred yards up the diminishing habitat on mountaintops, to escape the mounting heat.  The article quotes an evolutionary biologist: “It’s a really simple story that at some point you can’t go further north or higher up, so there’s no doubt that species will go extinct.” 

(I'm feeling like a) Grayheaded Bush Shrike

I am familiar with the sentiment. Yesterday was my last day on the job, a job that I happened (uncharacteristically) to like a lot and that paid me well. Yesterday, as it also happened, I went to the doctor under some duress and learned that I have pneumonia. None of this is really about global warming, nor about my pneumonia, nor about whether global warming might cure my pneumonia, nor even, for all of that, about me losing my job. It’s about change, adaptation, about just having to go further north or higher up yet again.  And does it have to be so . . . well, is 'traumatic' too strong? Couldn’t I just leave my job behind without all the stress and fanfare of respiratory trauma? There comes a point in everyone’s days, I suspect, when personal extinction looks like a promise of improvement; when one heartily wishes that extinction would just get it over with and make life easier, if you see what I mean.  

But not moving, refusing to adapt (or being too tired to), means you’re dead or will be soon; and no one will talk to you when you’re dead – at least no one you’d want to be talking to you if you weren’t already dead. So you start moving higher up again, whether you want to or not. The classic Darwinian view of adaptation is that it's a mechanism to insure the survival of a species, not just an individual. But even the remotest exposure to human behavior, not to mention all the empirical data in biology, prove this view to be completely fatheaded: the only thing that counts in anyone's day-to-day calculations is the ability of the individual to save his or her own bacon, the species be damned. What happens, after all, when ornate and complicated behavior which may have worked out just fine for, say, a million years or so (like Larry King's television show), just stops working and everyone walks away? 

Why should unemployment be so existentially disorienting rather than devoutly to be wished? Partly it's because we just can't carry on any more doing what we need to do to live, like growing rice and beans, or taking the boat out and bringing back catfish, or slaughtering buffalo from the Suburban. Life has grown complicated and technologically swamped, and we need so much now to survive, like Kindles or bicycles that shift electronically. (And a little New Zealand sea bass would be nice on those occasions that call for something special, like being mistaken for someone of the same name with an income above a quarter of a million and accidentally getting a tax break.)

I find that some of my calculations are both unrealistic and piecemeal - if, for example, my 15-year-old pickup with 200,000 miles will only wait to die until I do, that's a major bullet I'll have . . . . that's a major expense I'll have been spared. Or I'll be fine if I just stop eating altogether. But clearly these are merely stopgaps and not longterm solutions. Well, the part about the pickup isn't longterm, anyway. It quickly becomes apparent that this is the retirement equivalent of dicing with Death, trying to strike a fool's bargain with the Grim Reaper. No, one needs a plan.

One doesn't have to reinvent the wheel, and besides, the wheel has already been invented. Rather reinvent all those little cogs and radial gears and worm gears and rack-and-pinion arrangements that pass for the human brain.