Trinity University Press Best of 2014

Published by Trinity University Press San Antonio, Texas 78212 www.tupress.org Excerpt from Maximilian and Carlota © 2014 by M. M. McAllen Excerpt from The Osage Orange Tree © 2014 by the Estate of William Stafford Illustrations copyright © 2014 by Dennis Cunningham Excerpt from Early Morning © 2002, 2014 by Kim Stafford Excerpt from Outside © 2014 by Barry Holstun Lopez Illustrations copyright © by Barry Moser Excerpt from Unchopping a Tree © 2014 by W. S. Merwin Illustrations copyright © by Liz Ward Excerpt from Writing Architecture © 2014 by Carter Wiseman Excerpt from The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness © 2014 by Rebecca Solnit Excerpt from A Muse and a Maze © 2014 by Peter Turchi Excerpt from Nobody Home © 2014 by Julia Martin and Gary Snyder Copyright 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover design by DVS Design 978-1-59534-750-3 ebook

[contents] Maximilian and Carlota

2

The Osage Orange Tree

9

Early Morning

12

Outside

16

Unchopping a Tree

20

Writing Architecture

23

The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

27

A Muse and a Maze

38

Nobody Home

43

Maximilian and Carlota M. M. McAllen [excerpt from the Introduction: Mexicans, You Have Desired My Presence] At Veracruz, May 1864 Waiting to disembark, Carlota viewed the Mexican seaport rather cheerfully, writing to her eighty- twoyear-old grandmother, Marie-Amélie, the former queen of France, “We are leaving early tomorrow morning for Mexico City and will be en route for a while. I am infinitely pleased with the appearance of Veracruz. It reminds me of Cádiz, but a bit more oriental,” recalling her view of the ancient seaport on Spain’s western coast.

A short time later, French admiral Auguste Bosse and an aide rowed out to the royal steamer, climbed on deck, and Bosse proceeded to lambaste the captain for mooring in what he considered the most contagious waters at bearings so close to shore. People had died, he said, after only one night in port. Maximilian himself, a former admiral in the Austrian navy, had ordered the ship’s captain not to anchor near the French vessels but south of the fort, occupied by Napoléon III’s army, to thwart the impression, ironically, that he entered the country under French protection. He wanted his arrival to demon- strate he arrived at the invitation of the people of Mexico, who, he was assured, had voted for a monarchy. Bosse also grumbled on about guerrillas lying in wait along the long and treacherous route to Mexico City. He said that the French military commander-in-chief, Marshal François Achille Bazaine, remained too busy fighting in the field to personally escort the sovereigns from Veracruz. Maximilian tried to view the mix-ups lightly, while others stood aghast.

Finally, in the evening, Almonte and his wife, Dolores, along with Gen. Mariano Salas and other members of the Imperialist delegation arrived from Córdoba and rowed out in a few small skiffs to the Novara. Almonte, a long- time Mexican diplomat having served in France, England, and Spain, had assisted in constructing the conceptual Mexican Imperial government, ruling as chief of the regency until Maximilian’s arrival. He and the assembled Monarchists boarded the Novara, the deck illuminated by torches and lanterns, and formally welcomed Maximilian surrounded by officers and midshipmen.8 The emperor stood tall at six feet in height, a slender man with expressive blue eyes. He had very pale skin, almost pink some said, and silky, blond hair and a short beard that he parted in the middle in Austrian fashion. On this

evening, he dressed in a black frock coat, white vest, and white pants, with a black cravat. He greeted the Mexican legation warmly and drew the party into the upper deck salon, where they exchanged welcomes and pleasantries. The imperial prefect of Veracruz, Domingo Bureau, addressed Maximilian as the savior of Mexico, heralding his arrival as a new era under a “benign scepter.” At this historic moment, long anticipated by partisans ready for a Mexican monarchy, everyone gathered marveled at Maximilian, their sovereign, thanking God for a return to solid leadership at last.9 Maximilian replied, “I view with pleasure the arrival of the day when I can walk the soil of my new and beautiful country, and salute the people who have chosen me,” said Maximilian. “May God grant that the goodwill that led me toward you may be advantageous to you; and that all good Mexicans uniting to sustain me, there will be better days for Mexico.”

Maximilian then introduced Carlota to the committee. A pretty and tall but delicate-looking woman with dark and flashing eyes, she commanded attention without having to utter a word, accustomed as she was to being under- stood, the only daughter of the king of Belgium. In conversation, she had the habit of squinting as though trying to focus. She smiled, laughed, and usually conveyed a pleasant demeanor but transmitted the attitude that she was not in the habit of putting up with anyone’s trifling.

Joaquín Velásquez de León, the newly appointed secretary of state, made a sincere, welcoming speech to the imperial couple and then addressed Carlota. “The Mexicans, Madam, who expect so much from the good influence of your Majesty in favor of all that is noble and great, of all that bears relation to the elevated sentiments of religion and of country, bless the moment in which your Majesty reached the soil and proclaim in one voice, ‘Long Live the Empress.’” In slow but good Spanish, Carlota thanked the delegation, saying how happy she was at arriving in her new country. Afterward, during the reception, Almonte’s wife, Dolores, spontaneously embraced Carlota in customary Mexican fashion. The empress recoiled with uncertain awkwardness, unaccustomed to this sort of greeting, against the protocol and formality of the Belgian court.

From the Novara, Maximilian issued a written statement to the people of Mexico: “Mexicans: You have desired my presence. Your noble nation, by a voluntary majority, has chosen me to watch henceforth over your destinies.

I gladly respond to this call. Painful as it has been for me to bid farewell for- ever to my own, my native country, I have done so, being convinced that the Almighty has pointed out to me, through you, the mission of

devoting all my strength and heart to a people who, tired of war and disastrous contests, sincerely wish for peace and prosperity; to a people who having gloriously obtained their independence, desire to reap the benefit of civilization and true progress.”

Soon the French soldiers at Fort San Juan de Ulúa and on shore lit saltpeter torches known as bengalas, the blue glow stretching lambently across the water and illuminating the night sky. French sailors, anchored at the nearby Isla de Sacrificios, hung lanterns from their ships’ riggings and lines, and the troops fired petards and cannon salutes from the fortress. No one slept that night. Maximilian and Carlota eagerly waited for the moment to disembark and begin the trip to the capital and see their new country.

The next morning, at 4:30, Maximilian, Carlota, and their entourage of ministers and attendants attended mass. Afterward, the sailors rowed them to the breakwater, a mephitic smell rising from the gulf water. The boom of cannon saluted the royals’ arrival. A delegation of officials greeted them as they disembarked, welcomed them to Mexico, and presented them with a key to the city on a silver tray. Despite the sincerity of the town council, lady-inwaiting Paula Kollonitz described the reception as “chilling,” mostly by the absence of people. After the brief ceremony, Maximilian, Carlota, and their entourage climbed into carriages and traveled through the empty streets under French and Mexican military escort. They passed through a few arches erected to celebrate their arrival. At the perimeter of the town, military officials helped the entourage onto a narrow-gauge train waiting to take them west to the cooler, upper plateaus of Mexico. The unadorned rush seats and rickety condition of the cars unnerved some members of the entourage, accustomed to much grander modes of travel.

The rail line, improved hastily two years earlier by the French military to move their armies out of the pestilent climate of Veracruz, ended only a short way inland. At the small village of Loma Alta, the royal party transferred to carriages, some vehicles in better condition than others, to complete the three-hundred-mile trip. It was difficult finding space, not only for the passengers but also their five hundred pieces of luggage. The large entourage had to divide into several parties, given the impracticality of traveling in one long caravan. Those assigned to set up the royal household went ahead in order to reach Mexico City before the sovereigns. Many rode behind in cramped phaetons or mule-drawn covered diligences or simple wagons, and some, like William Heide, the conductor of the royal orchestra from Vienna, rode most of the way with his wife, Kate, on the back of a burro. Although their destination of Córdoba lay not far, the rugged terrain that one diplomat called a “sketch of a road” remained little

more than heavily rutted, muddy trails. Maximilian and Carlota rode in elaborate English traveling carriages, solidly built, but for paved roads.

The Mexican escorts repeatedly apologized for the condition of the road; however, Maximilian and Carlota assured them they did not mind, having traveled to tropical and rugged places in the past. The lush mountains with their rivers, ravines, and waterfalls astonished the emperor and empress with their beauty.

The royal couple now had their first glimpse of rural Mexico, comprised almost entirely of indigenous peoples living in poverty except for the riches of their gardens, which were bountiful. They had few possessions and lived plainly. The children, only half-clothed, kicked around coconuts playing ball games, while women offered the travelers bananas and mangos.

Members of the entourage worried about the narrow, slick roads and the steep ravines, known as barrancas, where guerrillas or highway bandits frequently lurked. Often the guerrillas worked for regional caudillos, or for Juárez, against the empire. The drivers kept the carriages steady on the mountain trails. Skilled drivers were paid extra if they went a hundred days without overturning a coach.

Stopping on the twisting route, they ate a hurried supper at the military post of Paso del Macho and resumed their trek to the next town of Córdoba. A storm erupted, and as sheets of water fell over the entourage, a wheel broke on Carlota’s carriage, forcing her to change vehicles. The gloom of night brought new worries of possible attacks by guerrillas. Carlota, remembering the warnings of Admiral Bosse at Veracruz, imagined gunmen at every turn but tried to remain calm. “Things looked so odd that I should not have been surprised if Juárez himself had appeared with some hundreds of guerrilleros.”

As the party approached Córdoba, the local priest sent a number of local people down the road to meet them. The natives carried torches to guide the carriages. They passed through one section known as Sal si puedes (get out if you can), named for the deep mire requiring all the energy of the mules. With sixteen reins in one hand and a whip in the other, the drivers whistled, called, and hissed, while a young assistant threw stones at the mule’s rumps and flanks, some animals under harness for the first time. Kollonitz thought the drivers picturesque with their short leather jackets, hairy goatskin leggings, and sombreros. When carriages turned over, Carlota later wrote that it required all their “youth and good humor to escape being crippled with stiffness or breaking a rib.”

Early on June 2, the royal party resumed its travels over the plateaus, through farm fields of corn, coffee, and fruit trees on the way to Orizaba, a short distance of about fifteen miles. Along the road, the sovereigns saw that

people of every little village built arches of welcome over the roads, and most citizens wore a token of their arrival on their hats.

As they reached Orizaba, known for its loyalty to Juárez, thousands of native clansmen came forth from the town to meet them. They surrounded the royal coach to get a look in the carriage at the emperor and his young, beautiful wife.

After a mass at the cathedral and a hymn of welcome and thanksgiving, or Te Deum, they toured the town looking at the panoramic views and the towering snowcapped cone of Mount Orizaba, the officials explaining its Nahuatl name, Citlaltépetl or Star Mountain. A group from the Naranjal community, an ancient and somewhat isolated region, had descended from their home in the mountains to hold a presentation for the royals and their attendants. Maximilian and Carlota were delighted and fascinated by their ceremonial attire, the men in silver embroidered tunics and short pants, machetes in their belts and heavy gold earrings. The women presented Carlota with a diamond ring said to be from the family of Montezuma, which she placed on her finger, with a promise to remember them always. They toured the nearby villages and heard speeches both in Nahuatl and Spanish. Thrilled with the frenzied greetings, Maximilian then spoke to the natives in Spanish while interpreters repeated the words in the native dialect. The empress presented 300 pesos to the municipal prefect for the local hospital and the poor. Later, during a tour of local convents and factories manufacturing paper and cotton products, they passed a group of unwelcoming but curious Liberals. Maximilian tipped his hat to them and they politely raised theirs in return. Those predisposed not to accept the royal couple could not deny their magnetism and charm.

The next morning, Carlota appeared in her riding habit, or traje de amazona, along with a sombrero, since she had chosen to cross the rugged mountains on horseback. For the ascent through the cumbres, they left Orizaba with an escort of French and Mexican imperial cavalry and other military numbering over a thousand men.

Maximilian and Carlota admired the skill and finery of the Mexican riders accompanying them with their embroidered attire and silver saddles. After stopping at the village of Acultzingo for their first Mexican-style breakfast of tortillas, various sauces of mole and chile, along with pulque to drink, they continued to wind upward through the Sierra Madre to La Cañada (Morelos Cañada). Here the party learned that guerrillas had been lying in wait for them, but that they had been dispersed.

One carriage bearing the imperial staff took a detour, and the passengers saw the bodies of dead guerrillas killed by the imperial guards. The entourage climbed slowly through the cordilleras, and in the early evening the

troops lit torches to see the narrow road. Everyone sat silent in their carriages as they bumped up the mountain path, listening for any attackers. Fireflies twinkled in the dense vegetation. Hours passed until they crossed the cumbres and arrived at La Cañada, most of the party exhausted. The next morning as they made their way through Palmar de Bravo, they could see in the distance for the first time the two volcanoes of Popocatépetl and Iztaccihuatl with their snowy peaks of 17,000 feet towering on the western horizon.

On June 5, as they approached the major Catholic center of Puebla de Los Angeles, a cavalcade of riders in full regalia, with silver saddles and bridles embroidered in metallic thread and tassels, rode out of the city to greet them. Many of the men carried their small sons with them on horseback. In the city, women and children in their finest attire cheered in the streets and from balconies. Banners fluttered from buildings and enormous arches decorated the streets. Bells pealed from the city’s numerous churches. Their enthusiasm reassured Maximilian, who was greatly moved by the passionate greetings and gladly returned their joy. The people of Puebla, a strong center of Conservatives with a population of 70,000, remained intensely curious about the royal couple, many feeling that Maximilian and Carlota would bring peace and prosperity after a decade of civil war. Priests, who only a year earlier hid from Juárez’s Liberals, joyously welcomed the monarchy, expecting a new era.

They were to stay at a lavish home in Puebla, with separate festivities planned for the men and women.

Carlota, with her attendants, attended a dinner party at the home of city prefect, Juan E. de Uriarte, but curiously, as she entered the house and was escorted into the dining room, the rest of the guests remained in the drawing room, staring expectantly. After a few awkward moments, someone explained that the empress must invite the guests to join her at the table, which she proceeded to do. During the meal, language difficulties strained conversations, with Carlota’s limited Spanish skills and only one woman knowing a little French. At the end of the meal, “we sat looking at each other after supper for a long time before the company gave signs of departing,” Paula Kollonitz explained.

Carlota seemed unruffled, knowing such tensions could be expected with the arrival of the royal couple.

The next morning, June 7, Carlota marked her twenty-fourth birthday. The day began with a splendid celebration in Puebla with mass at the cathedral conducted by the bishop. Carlota gave 7,000 pesos to repair the local hospital, and Maximilian gave another 1,000 to found a maternity ward. That evening a large dinner at the presidio preceded a grand ball at the Alhóndiga, the old granary refitted as a place for public events. For the occasion, Carlota wore a white silk dress and a crown adorned with red and white roses encrusted with enamel, emeralds, and diamonds, the

colors of the Mexican flag. A necklace of large white diamonds completed her stunning outfit. From the street, the royal couple walked over a carpet of flowers to the building’s portal.

As the royal couple entered the building, they could see in the corners of the courtyard pyramids of crystal vases, built to look like the Aztec monuments, emitting various prismatic lights. Maximilian and Carlota seated themselves at two thrones built for the occasion. The guests participated in a quadrille, dancing until dawn, although the sovereigns retired at midnight, their usual habit of leaving well before a celebration’s end. The next morning, the royal couple bid town fathers adieu and donated additional funds to repair the alms- house. Carlota thanked them for “a welcome, which on my birthday, makes me feel that I am among my own people, in my own country, surrounded by loving friends.”

Moreover, this overland journey to Mexico City revealed to Maximilian, and especially Carlota, the great disparity in wealth and privilege that plagued Mexico. “Everything in this country has got to be begun all over again; one finds nothing but nature, whether in the physical or in the moral order. Their education has to be undertaken down to the smallest details,” Carlota wrote Eugénie, empress of France.

The Osage Orange Tree William Stafford Illustrations by Dennis Cunningham [excerpt] On that first day of high school in the prairie town where the tree was, I stood in the sun by the flagpole and watched, but pretended not to watch, the others. They stood in groups and talked and knew each other, all except one—a girl though—in a faded blue dress, carrying a sack lunch and standing near the corner looking everywhere but at the crowd.

I might talk to her, I thought. But of course it was out of the question. That first day was easier when the classes started. Some of the teachers were kind; some were frightening. Some of the students didn’t care, but I listened and waited; and at the end of the day I was relieved, less conspicuous from then on.

But that day was not really over. As I hurried to carry my new paper route, I was thinking about how in a strange town, if you are quiet, no one notices, and some may like you, later. I was thinking about this when I reached the north edge of town where the scattering houses dwindle. Beyond them to the north lay just openness, the plains, a big swoop of nothing.

There, at the last house, just as I cut across a lot and threw to the last customer, I saw the girl in the blue dress coming along the street, heading on out of town, carrying books. And she saw me.

“Hello.”

“Hello.”

Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford Kim Stafford [Chapter 1: My Father’s Place ] A few days after my father died, I needed to sleep alone at the home place, to go back to the room I shared with my brother when we were young. Mother was away. I came to the house after dark, found the hidden key. In the home labyrinth, your feet know the way. Down the hall in the old garage, I turned into the study my father had built, where I stood a moment: dark walls, dim rows of books, papers on the desk, the making place. Then up two steps to the kitchen, a turn down the hall, and into the room of childhood.

For the first time in years, I slept deeply from the moment I lay down—until I woke at around 4 a.m. Mother had told me that since his death she, too, had been wakened at my father’s customary writing time. As I opened my eyes, the moon was shining through the bedroom window. The house was still, the neighborhood quiet. Something beckoned me to rise, a soft tug. Nothing mystical, just a habit to the place. Lines from a poem of his came to mind: When you wake to the dream of now from night and its other dream, you carry day out of the dark like a flame.

This beckoning before first light brought a hint from my father’s life, and I accepted it: ....................

Your life you live by the light you find and follow it on as well as you can, carrying through darkness wherever you go your one little fire that will start again.

—from “The Dream of Now”

I dressed and shuffled down the hall. In the kitchen, I remembered how my father would make a cup of instant coffee and some toast. Following his custom, I put the kettle on, sliced bread my mother had made, and marveled at how sharp my father had kept the knife. The plink of the spoon stirring coffee was the only sound, then the scrape of a butter knife. My father’s ritual pulled me on: I was to go to the couch and lie down with paper.

I took the green mohair blanket from the closet, turned on a lamp, and settled in the horizontal place on the couch where my father had greeted ten thousand early mornings with his pen and paper. I put my head on the pillow just where his head had worn through the silk lining and propped my notebook against my knees.

What should I write? There was no sign, only a feeling of generosity in the room. A streetlight brightened the curtain beside me, but the rest of the room was dark. I let my gaze rove the walls—the fireplace, the dim rectangle of a painting, the hooded box of the television cabinet, a table with magazines. It was all ordinary, at rest. In the dark of the house my father’s death had become an empty bowl that filled from below, the stone cavern of a spring. I felt grief, and also abundance. Many people had written us, “Words cannot begin to express how we feel without Bill. . . .” I, too, was sometimes mute with grief. But if my father had taught me one thing about writing, it was that words can begin to express how it is in hard times, especially if the words are relaxed, direct in their own plain ways.

I looked for a long time at the bouquet of sunflowers on the coffee table. I remembered sunflowers are the state flower of Kansas. I remembered my father’s poem about yellow cars. I remembered how we had eaten the last of his summer plantings of green beans.

I thought back to my father’s last poem, the one he wrote the day he died. He had begun with a line from an ordinary experience—a stray call from an insurance agent trying to track down what turned out to be a different William Stafford. The call had amused him, the agent’s words had stayed with him. And that morning, 28 August 1993, he had begun to write: “Are you Mr. William Stafford?”

“Yes, but. . . .”

As he often did, he started his last poem with recent news from his own life before coming to deeper things. But I wasn’t delving into his writing now. I was in the cell of his writing time, alive earlier than anyone, more alert in welcome, listening.

The house was so quiet I heard the tap of my heart, felt the sweetness of each breath and the easy exhalation.

It seemed my eyes, as in one of my father’s poems, had been “tapered for braille.” The edge of the coffee table held a soft gleam from the streetlight. The stack of magazines was jostled where he had touched them. Then I saw how each sunflower had dropped a little constellation of pollen on the table. The pollen seemed to burn. The soft tug that had wakened me, the tug I still felt, wanted me awake to ordinary things, to sip my bitter coffee, to gaze about, and to wait. Another of his poems came to mind: How still earth stayed that night at first when you didn’t breathe. I couldn’t believe how carefully moonlight came.

—from “Letting You Go” The way moonlight touched the curtain seemed to be instructing me how to breathe, to think, to wonder. My father had said once that time alone would allow anyone to go inward, in order to go outward. You had to go into yourself to find patterns bigger than your life.

I started to write ordinary things. Then I came to the sunflowers. This could be told wrong if I tried too hard.

My father’s way is not about trying, not about writing poems, not about achievement, certainly not fame. His way is being private before first light, with your breath, the scratch of the pen. His way is something like worn silk, a blanket, and that dusting of pollen from the sunflowers.

My head fit his dent in the pillow. My hand moved easily with the pen: pause at the gate to take off the one big shoe of his body, step forward light as wind.

In the uninterrupted abundance of my own time, I finished a page, closed my notebook, and rose for the day.

As my father would say at such a time, there was much to do but I had done the big thing already.

Who will take my father’s place in the world of poetry? No one. Who will take his place in this daily practice of the language of the tribe? Anyone who wishes. He said once the field of writing will never be crowded— not because people can’t do important work, but because they don’t think they can. This way of writing is available to anyone who wishes to rise and listen, to put words together without fear of either failure or achievement. You wake. You find a stove where you make something warm. You have a light that leaves much of the room dark. You

settle in a place you have worn with the friendly shape of your body. You receive your own breath, recollection, the blessings of your casual gaze. You address the wall, the table, and whatever stands this day for Kansas pollen.

“There’s a thread you follow,” my father wrote. Deep night, and early morning, my page of writing, pollen on the table—these were the filaments I would need in the work he left me.

Outside Barry Lopez Illustrations by Barry Moser [Desert Notes] I know you are tired. I am tired too. Will you walk along the edge of the desert with me? I would like to show you what lies before us.

All my life I have wanted to trick blood from a rock. I have dreamed about raising the devil and cutting him in half. I have thought too about never being afraid of anything at all. This is where you come to do those things.

I know what they tell you about the desert but you mustn’t believe them. This is no deathbed. Dig down, the earth is moist. Boulders have turned to dust here, the dust feels like graphite. You can hear a man breathe at a distance of twenty yards. You can see out there to the edge where the desert stops and the mountains begin. You think it is perhaps ten miles. It is more than a hundred. Just before the sun sets all the colors will change. Green will turn to blue, red to gold.

I’ve been told there is very little time left, that we must get all these things about time and place straight. If we don’t, we will only have passed on and have changed nothing. That is why we are here I think, to change things.

It is why I came to the desert.

Here things are sharp, elemental. There’s no one to look over your shoulder to find out what you’re doing with your hands, or to ask if you have considered the number of people dying daily of malnutrition. If you’ve been listening you must suspect that a knife will be very useful out here--not to use, just to look at.

There is something else here, too, even more important: explanations will occur to you, seeming to clarify; but they can be a kind of trick. You will think you have hold of the idea when you only have hold of its clothing.

Feel how still it is. You can become impatient here, willing to accept any explanation in order to move on.

This appears to be nothing at all, but it is a wall between you and what you are after. Be sure you are not tricked into thinking there is nothing to fear. Moving on is not important. You must wait. You must take things down to the core.

You must be careful with everything, even with what I tell you.

This is how to do it. Wait for everything to get undressed and go to sleep. Forget to explain to yourself why you are here. Listen attentively. Just before dawn you will finally hear faint music. This is the sound of the loudest dreaming, the dreams of boulders. Continue to listen until the music isn’t there. What you thought about boulders will evaporate and what you know will become clear. Each night it will be harder. Listen until you can hear the dreams of the dust that settles on your head.

I must tell you something else. I have waited out here for rattlesnakes. They never come. The moment eludes me and I hate it. But it keeps me out here. I would like to trick the rattlesnake into killing itself. I would like this kind of finality. I would like to begin again with the snake. If such a thing were possible. The desert would be safe. You could stay here forever.

I will give you a few things: bits of rock, a few twigs, this shell of a beetle blown out here by the wind. You should try to put the bits of rock back together to form a stone, although I cannot say that all these pieces are from the same stone. If they don’t fit together look for others that do. You should try to coax some leaves from these twigs.

You will first have to determine whether they are alive or dead. And you will have to find out what happened to the rest of the beetle, the innards. When you have done these things you will know a little more than you did before. But be careful. It will occur to you that these tasks are silly or easily done. This is a sign, the first one, that you are being fooled.

I hope you won’t be here long. After you have finished with the stone, the twigs and the beetle, other things will suggest themselves, and you must take care of them. I see you are already tired. But you must stay. This is the pain of it all. You can’t keep leaving.

Do you hear how silent it is? This will be a comfort as you work. Do not laugh. When I first came here I laughed very loud and the sun struck me across the face and it took me a week to recover. You will only lose time by laughing.

I will leave you alone to look out on the desert. What makes you want to leave now is what is trying to kill you. Have the patience to wait until the rattlesnake kills itself. Others may tell you that this has already happened, and this may be true. But wait until you see for yourself, until you are sure.

Unchopping a Tree W. S. Merwin Illustrations by Liz Ward [excerpt] There is a certain beauty, you will notice at moments, in the pattern of the chips as they are fitted back into place.

You will wonder to what extent it should be described as natural, to what extent man-made. It will lead you on to speculations about the parentage of beauty itself, to which you will return.

Writing Architecture: A Practical Guide to Clear Communication about the Built Environment Carter Wiseman [excerpt from Chapter 1: Structrue] Like the architectural design process itself, writing about architecture requires students and practitioners to concentrate on essentials and organize them in a coherent fashion. But most writers on architecture—or any other subject—tend to start typing in hopes of finding out what they want to say. Worse, they may persuade themselves that if they wait long enough, or do enough research, inspiration will strike and carry them to a successful conclusion by sheer momentum. Not a chance!

Every experienced writer learns at some point that disciplined application is the key to success. The Germans have a wonderfully expressive term to encourage students to apply themselves. It is Sitzfleisch, which can be roughly translated as “keeping one’s butt in the chair.”

The challenge for the butt’s owner is to overcome the anxiety that inevitably accompanies the beginning of any serious writing. Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously said during the Great Depression, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” The same might be said of writing. In a foreword to The Elements of Style—that slim classic of instruction in English usage—the veteran New Yorker writer and editor Roger Angell reminds us that “writing is hard, even for authors who do it all the time.”

Our educational system has made writing harder. We are all natural storytellers. When meeting a friend after an interesting day at work, we usually start with something like “You’ll never believe what happened at the office!”

Then we will fill in some background, move on to describing the events of the day, and wrap up with a conclusion

about their impact. That represents the basic structure of any piece of nonfiction. However, when we turn to our own writing, our innate narrative skills are often frustrated by “rubrics,” “prompts,” departmental “guidelines,” “accepted practice,” and other restrictions that often specify too much (“five paragraphs,” “two quotes per paragraph,” “oneinch margins,” “MLA style”) without supporting the main mission of getting one’s point across. If writing strikes fear into your brain and your fingers, you are in good company. But there are ways to overcome this fear and take some control of the process out of the hands of mechanical teachers, petty editors, and meddlesome bosses. An important first step is to realize that those teachers, editors, and bosses are not necessarily any smarter than you are.

They have been on the job longer than you have, which means they are more familiar with the material, but there is no guarantee that their skills at architectural analysis or presentation are naturally any better than yours.

Most writers will admit that after they have resharpened all their pencils, rearranged all the furniture in their rooms, and reorganized all the books on their shelves in order to avoid touching the keyboard, they play a few psychological games with themselves to get the creative process moving. One of the simplest games is to take the number of words the project requires and divide it by the amount of time available to write it. If you are facing a tenpage academic paper, journal article, or presentation to a client, you may be looking at about 2,500 words, assuming 250 words to a double-spaced page. If you have two weeks in which to write the piece, and you take the weekends off, you have ten days available for writing. Dividing 2,500 words by ten days means that all you have to do is to write a page a day! (If you write more, you can reward yourself with a breather. If you write less, add an hour next time.)

But suppose, you say, what you write is murky and disorganized. What seemed brilliant at bedtime may seem lame in the morning. Not to worry. At least you have something to fix, and the process of fixing—or editing— will quickly take your mind off the fear that threatened to paralyze you at the outset. And no matter how much you have written, you get a regular (if small) reward. That reward is checking the number of words you have put down since you started the session, a calculation that computers can make at a stroke. If your final goal is 2,500 words, and you have written one page, you are one-tenth of the way home! And you can be secure in the knowledge that if you keep the pace, you will inevitably get to where you are going in the time allotted. But you can never get there by standing still and waiting for the muse to appear.

There are two other sources of anxiety that tend to handicap writers on architecture at the very beginning.

One has to do with the people you are writing for—your audience. Students often ask if they should have an

academic or professional readership in mind. Every field has some level of specialty, and readers familiar with it expect to be addressed with respect for that knowledge. Lawyers, doctors, and other professionals all have their own “lingo,” but that is merely a matter of terminology. What is “dispositive” for an attorney is simply “conclusive” for the rest of us. My recommendation is that you write for yourself—an intelligent, literate person with a strong interest in the material. You can always dress up the language as you edit, but no amount of dressing up will compensate for a lack of clear thinking and organization.

Another source of concern is style. After Ernest Hemingway began to write his lean stories of lonely heroes demonstrating grace under pressure, his use of short words and his lack of standard punctuation spawned generations of imitators. But the key to Hemingway’s success was the clarity of his message about the relationship of his characters to their fate, not the prose through which he expressed it. In the end, style emerges naturally because each of us chooses words differently from everyone else based on our own experience with language. Without realizing it, you will develop a style that reflects your own personality; you should never try to be someone else.

Important as each of the structural components of a well-written essay may be, they can put off even the sympathetic reader if they are not assembled in a graceful way. Paragraphs that simply follow one another as if they were parts of an amplified outline can seem choppy and abrupt. Knitting them gracefully together is an important part of writing something that is not only informative, but also a pleasure to read. If they can be reorganized at random, they are not in the right place.

There are numerous ways to ease the transition from one paragraph to another, but the most effective usually make a reference to what has gone immediately before, while previewing the material that is to follow. To return to the Daniel Burnham example, a writer on his career would have to acknowledge his impact as a planner and organizer, but it would also need to assess his architectural aesthetics. Thus a paragraph that follows a section on the Columbian Exposition might begin this way: “Extraordinary as Burnham’s achievements as the mastermind of the Fair may have been, questions linger about his artistic skills.” If you are evaluating the impact of the demolition of Penn Station on the preservation movement, you might begin a paragraph by writing: “The loss of McKim, Mead & White’s masterpiece was perhaps the darkest moment in the history of America’s reverence for profit over art, but it was not the last.”

Even though you may start writing with a firm sense of the overall structure, you may stall if you insist on starting at the beginning. The first lines of a piece are essential to drawing your readers in and persuading them to continue. For that reason, they are often the most difficult to write. To avoid the pain and frustration of composing a perfect beginning, pick an easier part of the piece and start there. An analysis of Burnham's career would have to include some reference to his professional training. Writing about that requires no special insight, but by recording simple facts you will find that your fingers and your brain begin to loosen up. I like to think of Michelangelo’s statue of David as a model for this approach. Genius that he was, the sculptor probably did not start at the top of his block of marble, making each curl of the hero’s hair perfect before starting on the slingshot. By leaving the introduction for later and tapping away at the history, the development, the summary, and the future sections of your piece in no particular order, you will find that the work is beginning to take shape almost on its own, and a thesis is beginning to assert itself—like David emerging from the stone!

The only hazard of this “sculptural” approach is that you may be tempted to expand one section at the expense of the others. So keep an eye on the word count and remember that if one element gets larger, another must get smaller. Every now and then, check to make sure that your research is not threatening to alter your emerging thesis. If it is, then you can still change course, something you could not have done easily if you had begun typing before you began thinking.

Should you get stuck and wonder where your argument is leading, there is a time-honored writer’s device available: close your door and read what you have written out loud from the beginning. Most often, the momentum of your prose will point you in the right direction. If you feel that you have read and reread your prose so often that you can no longer be objective about it, you can take an extreme measure. One established writer has been known to pin a typescript to a wall, walk to the opposite end of the room, and view the writing through binoculars for a new perspective.

So much for planning and structure in the abstract. In the chapters that follow, we will apply these structural principles to examples of writing on architecture by some of its best practitioners to see how their work may help yours.

The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness Rebecca Solnit [“On the Dirtiness of Laundry and the Strength of Sisters: Or, Mysteries of Henry David Thoreau, Unsolved”] There is one writer in all literature whose laundry arrangements have been excoriated again and again, and it is not Virginia Woolf, who almost certainly never did her own washing, or James Baldwin, or the rest of the global pantheon. The laundry of the poets remains a closed topic, from the tubercular John Keats (blood-spotted handkerchiefs) to Pablo Neruda (lots of rumpled sheets). Only Henry David Thoreau has been tried in the popular imagination and found wanting for his cleaning arrangements, though the true nature of those arrangements are not so clear.

I got prodded into taking an interest in the laundry of the author of “Civil Disobedience” and “A Few Words in Defense of John Brown” in the course of an unwise exchange. Let me begin again by saying that I actually like using Facebook, on which this particular morning I had sent birthday wishes to my Cuban translator and disseminated a booklet about debt resistance. I signed up for Facebook in 2007 to try to keep track of what young Burmese exiles were doing in response to the uprising in that country, and so I use it with fewer blushes than a lot of my friends—and perhaps even my “friends,” since Facebook has provided me with a few thousand souls in that incoherent category.

And really, this is an essay about categories, which I have found such leaky vessels all my life: everything you can say about a category of people—immigrant taxi drivers, say, or nuns—has its exceptions, and so the category obscures more than it explains, though it does let people tidy up the complicated world into something simpler. I knew a Franciscan nun who started the great era of civil-disobedience actions against nuclear weapons at the Nevada Test Site that were to reshape my life so profoundly and lead to the largest mass arrests in American history, but remind me someday to tell you about the crackhead nun on the lam who framed her sex partner as a rapist and car thief. A private eye I know exonerated him, as I intend to do with Thoreau, uncle if not father of civil disobedience,

over the question of the laundry.

It’s because I bridle at so many categories that I objected to an acquaintance’s sweeping generalization on Facebook that Americans don’t care about prisoners. Now, more than 2 million of us are prisoners in this country, and many millions more are the family members of those in prison or are in the category of poor nonwhite people most often imprisoned, and all these people probably aren’t indifferent. In my mild response I mentioned a host of organizations like the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has done a great deal for the prisoners in Guantanamo.

I could’ve mentioned my friend Scott, who was a pro-bono lawyer for the Angola Three for a decade or so, or my friend Melody, a criminal defense investigator who did quite a lot for people on death row. They are a minority, but they count.

Having ignored the warning signs of someone looking for people to condemn, I recklessly kept typing: “We were the nation of Thoreau and John Brown and the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society when we were also the nation of slaveowners—and slaves.” Which was a way of reiterating my sense that the opposite is also true of almost anything you can say about this vast messy empire of everybody from everywhere that pretends to be a coherent country, this place that is swamps and skyscrapers and mobile homes and Pueblo people in fourteenth-century villages on the Rio Grande. And 2.5 million prisoners. Truth for me has always come in tints and shades and spectrums and never in black and white, and America is a category so big as to be useless, unless you’re talking about the government.

The poster replied: “And the nation of Thoreau’s sister who came every week to take his dirty laundry.” This was apparently supposed to mean that Thoreau was not a noble idealist but a man who let women do the dirty work, even though it had nothing to do with whether or not Thoreau or other Americans cared about prisoners, which is what we were supposed to be talking about. Or maybe it suggested that Thoreau’s sister was imprisoned by gender roles and housework. It was also meant to imply that I worshipped false gods. I have heard other versions of this complaint about Thoreau. Quite a lot of people think that Thoreau was pretending to be a hermit in his cabin on Walden Pond while cheating by going home and visiting people and eating in town and otherwise being convivial and enjoying himself and benefitting from civilization. They think he is a hypocrite.

They mistake him for John Muir, who went alone deep into something that actually resembled the modern idea of wilderness (although it was, of course, indigenous homeland in which Muir alternately patronized and ignored the still-present Native Americans). Then, after his first, second, and several more summers in the Sierra,

Muir married well and eventually lived in a grand three-story house in Martinez, California, and ran his father-inlaw’s big orchard business that paid for it all. Even John Muir is difficult to categorize, since he was gregarious enough to cofound the Sierra Club and complicated enough to labor as a lumberjack and sheepherder in the mountains he eventually wished to protect from logging and grazing. None of us is pure, and purity is a dreary pursuit best left to Puritans.

The tiny, well-built cabin at Walden was a laboratory for a prankish investigation of work, money, time, and space by our nation’s or empire’s trickster-in-chief, as well as a quiet place to write. During his two years there, Thoreau was never far from town, and he was not retreating from anything. He was advancing toward other things.

The woods he roamed, before, during, and after his time in the famous shack, contained evidence of Indians, locals doing the various things people do in woods, including gathering wood and hunting, and escaped slaves on the long road north to Canada and freedom. He traveled with some of these slaves, guided them a little, and they guided him in other ways.

Slavery was very much on his mind during the time he lived at Walden Pond. His mother’s and sisters’ organization, the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, met at least once in his cabin (for a celebration of the anniversary of the liberation of slaves in the Indies, shortly after he himself spent a night as a prisoner). This is how not a recluse he was: there were meetings in that tiny cabin that engaged with the laws of the nation and the status of strangers far away, and he also went to jail during that time, because he was fiercely opposed to the territorial war against Mexico and to slavery.

The threads of empathy and obligation and idealism spun out from those people and those meetings. The Concord abolitionists chose to care about people they had never met; they chose to pit themselves against the most horrific injustices and established laws of their society; and they did it at a time when they were a small minority and the end of slavery was hardly visible on the horizon.

And the laundry? I did a quick online search and found a long parade of people who pretended to care who did Thoreau’s laundry as a way of not having to care about Thoreau. They thought of Thoreau as a balloon and the laundry was their pin. Andrew Boynton in Forbes magazine observed in 2007 that his mother did his laundry; a cheesy website noted that he “took his dirty laundry home to mom!”; in 1983, a ponderous gentleman named Joseph Moldenhauer got in early on the accusation that he “brought his mother his dirty laundry”; a blogger complained that “he had someone else do his laundry”; another writer referred offhandedly to the “women who did his laundry.”

A writer on an environmental website recently complained, “While philosophizing about self-sufficiency in his solitary shack, he would drop off his laundry at his mother’s place back in town”; even Garrison Keillor got involved in the laundry question— “He wrote elegantly about independence and forgot to thank his mom for doing his laundry”; there’s even a collection of short stories called Thoreau’s Laundry, as well as a website that sells a Thoreau laundry bag. Search engines having a genius for incoherent categories: I also learned that Thoreau, New Mexico, a pleasant little town on Interstate 40, has four Laundromats.

The standard allegation—the reader will note—is that Thoreau’s mother, Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau, did his washing, not his sister, and no one suggests that she had to fetch it first. Besides which, he had two sisters, Sophia and Helen. The sneering follow-up message I got from the person who claimed that Thoreau was a man whose sister did his washing made me feel crummy for a day or so during an otherwise ebullient period of being around people that I love and who love me back. I composed various ripostes in my head.

Having grown up with parents who believed deeply in the importance of being right and the merit of facts, I usually have to calm down and back up to realize that there is no such thing as winning an argument in this kind of situation, only escalating. Facebook’s verb “friend” is annoying, but its corollary, “unfriend,” is occasionally useful.

I decided against unfriending and opted for simply avoiding the person into whose unfriendly fire I’d strayed.

The thing to do was to seek out more convivial company. I had dinner the next night with my friend Thomas, whom I’ve known almost twenty years and at whose wedding I was best man. A half-Burmese Londoner, he’s only been in this hemisphere about five years, and he told me that reading Walden recently helped reconcile him to American individualism by exhibiting it as something energetic and eccentric as well as assertive. We began to correspond about Thoreau, and that dialogue deepened what was already a great friendship. I know two actual Thoreau scholars—one I met in the 1990s in Reno, and another who sought me out via Facebook (before the incident in question) and with whom I’d corresponded a little. I turned to them for more informed opinions on the washing. I wasn’t going to argue about it; but I did want to know the truth for my own satisfaction.

The first acquaintance, Professor Michael Branch at the University of Nevada, Reno, was tired of hearing about the laundry: “The problem with explaining how much work the guy did is that you end up defending the wrong cause. I’ve stepped into this bear trap before,” wrote Branch. He listed some of the kinds of labor the shaggy Transcendentalist performed, including teaching, surveying, and running his family’s pencil factory. But, he cautioned, “once you make this case, you’ve accidentally blessed the idea that paying attention to the world, studying

botany, and writing a shitload of amazing prose isn’t real work. Better to just say he never did a damned thing except write the century’s best book and leave it at that. Lazy fucker.”

Do we care who did the chores in any other creative household on earth? Did Dante ever take out the slops?

Do we love housework that much? Or do we hate it that much? This fixation on the laundry is related to the larger question of whether artists should be good people as well as good artists, and probably the short answer is that everyone should be a good person, but a lot of artists were only good artists (and quite a lot more were only bad artists). Whether or not they were good people, the good artists gave us something. Pablo Picasso was sometimes not very nice to his lady friends, but he could paint. I was friends with the artist and filmmaker Bruce Conner for a quarter century, and his unreasonable insistence on perfection made his work brilliant and his company exacting and sometimes terrifying.

It wasn’t as though if he hadn’t made those seminal films and assemblages he would’ve been an uncomplicated good guy; it’s not as though he was giving to art what he should have given to life; he was putting out what he had, and it was a huge and lasting gift on this impure earth, even if it came from an imperfect man. Thoreau was a moralist, a person who wrote about what we should do, how to walk, or how to fight the government about slavery; and a moralist holds himself up to a higher standard: does he, so to speak, walk his talk? Or so moralists are always tested, but their premises are right or not independent of whether or not they live up to them. Martin Luther King Jr. was right about racism and injustice whether or not he led a blameless life. Digging into his dirty laundry doesn’t undo those realities, though the FBI tried to blackmail and undermine him that way.

The second scholar I wrote to was also a Michael, Michael Sims, who was working on a book about the young Thoreau, and he was well primed for the question. “Thoreau did visit the village almost every day, and see his parents, and do chores around the house for them,” he wrote. He continued: While he was at Walden, they were in a house he helped build the year before he moved to the cabin—he and his father mainly—so he had considerable goodwill in the bank. During his entire adult life, he paid rent while at his parents’ boarding house, and paid it faithfully, with records sometimes kept on the backs of poems or other writings. He worked in the garden, helped keep the house in good repair, provided foods from his own garden, and so on.

People did drop by the cabin to bring him food sometimes, but people dropped by each other’s houses with food all the time. It was the most common gift. He brought other people food,

especially melons. (He was legendary for his talent in raising a vast array of melons.) I don’t know if I have an actual record of the family doing his laundry, but I’ll check as I go through some of that over the next month. But I would bet they did sometimes do his laundry. He was quite emotionally dependent upon his family, especially his mother, but he also contributed constantly. When his brother died young, Henry helped take up the slack in financial help. When his father died, Henry became not only the man of the house but the major force in the pencil business (which he had already almost revolutionized with his analysis of better ways to make pencils). So I think what I’m trying to say is that even at Walden he was very much a part of the family in every way.

After looking into the laundry accusations, I opened Walden again and examined the section where he does his accounts, which, as the historian Richard White points out, were a sort of parody of nineteenth-century preoccupations with efficiency and profitability, with the pettiness of keeping score and the souls of bookkeepers. He mentions “washing and mending, which for the most part were done out of the house, and their bills have not yet been received.” It’s not clear if that’s out of his own cabin or his mother’s house, during the Walden era, but it suggests that maybe his washing was done by strangers in a commercial transaction, or that maybe he thought that the question of who did the laundry was amusing and made an indecipherable joke about a bill his family wasn’t really going to send.

He was, after all, the man who warned us against enterprises that required new clothes, often wore shabby ones, and was certainly not very concerned about having clean ones. He never married and did little to make work for women and did quite a bit of dirty work himself, including shoveling manure—of which he wrote, “Great thoughts hallow any labor. To-day I earned seventy five cents heaving manure out of a pen, and made a good bargain of it.”

He worked quite hard, often for his sisters’ benefit, though he also played around with the idea of work, appointing himself inspector of snowstorms and proposing that his employment could be watching the seasons, which he did with such precision, describing what bloomed when and which bird species arrived on what date in his corner of Massachusetts, that his journals have been used to chart climate change in the present. We call that work—which was also so clearly a pleasure for him—science.

Intermittently, throughout his adult life, he was also struggling with tuberculosis, the disease that killed his older sister, Helen, in 1849 and sometimes sapped his strength long before it killed him in 1862. At the time of his death, he was lying in bed downstairs in a parlor with his younger sister Sophia at his side. Though we talk so much

about the twenty-six months he dwelt at Walden Pond, he spent most of the rest of the forty-five years of his life at home with his family, as an intimate and essential part of what appears to have been an exceptionally loving group.

Labor was divided up by gender in those days, but it’s hard to argue that women always had the worst of it in an era when men did the heavy work on farms and often the dirtiest and most physically demanding work around the house (in those days of outhouses, wood chopping, shoveling ashes and coal, handling horses and livestock, butchering, water pumping, and other largely bygone chores). Everyone worked around the home, until they became so affluent no one worked beyond the symbolic femininity of needlework. In between those two poles was a plethora of families who had hired help with the housework. I don’t think women were particularly subjugated by domestic work in the centuries before housewives in the modern sense existed, though gender roles themselves deprived them of agency, voice, and rights. Thoreau’s sisters resisted and maybe overcame them without their brother’s aid.

Thoreau’s mother ran a boardinghouse, and yet another writer on Thoreau, Robert Sullivan, points out that, like a lot of nineteenth-century households, they had help—and that the Transcendentalists were uncomfortable with the hierarchy of servants and employers (Emerson tried having the maid sit at the dinner table with the family, but the cook refused to do so).

Perhaps Thoreau, his mother, and his sisters all had their washing done by the same servant, or servants, who Sullivan suggests were likely to be recent Irish immigrants. Ireland’s Catholics, fleeing the potato famine and British brutality, had started to arrive in the 1840s, and a torrent of desperate Irish would pour into this country for several decades; I am descended from some of them, and my orphaned Irish-American grandmother used to attribute her excellent figure to doing the washing (by hand, on a washboard) for the family that raised her. In his journal entry for June 9, 1853, Thoreau expresses sympathy for an Irish maid named Mary who told him she quit her position on a dairy farm because she was supposed to do the washing for twenty-two people, including ten men with two pairs of dirty overalls apiece.

The project of liberation is never-ending, most urgent at its most literal but increasingly complex as it becomes metaphysical. Only free people can care about slaves or prisoners and do something about slavery and prisons, which is why the project of liberating yourself is not necessarily selfish (as long as you don’t go down that endless solitary path marked After I’m Perfect I’ll Do Something for Others, but stay on the boulevard marked My Freedom Is for Your Liberation Which I Must Also Attend to Now). On October 13, 2012, a few weeks after the unpleasant interchange about prisoners and laundry, I went to San Quentin State Prison to hear the prisoners read.

San Quentin was even more prisonlike than I’d imagined, with a patchwork of intimidating architectural styles: some crenellations like a medieval fortress, guard towers, sheer walls, razor-wire coils, warning signs, and entrance via steel gates that actually did slam shut with an echoing clang. We, the mostly female, mostly white audience for the reading, had been sent a long list of colors we were not allowed to wear: blue, of course, but so many other colors that finally only black and purple and pink and patterns seemed safe for sure, so we looked as though we were going to a funeral or a punk concert. The prisoners were wearing various shades of blue, work boots or running shoes, and some jewelry. One had a Santa beard, one had dreadlocks, and the Latino murderer had a sharp pompadour and thick mustache. Only one of them looked young.

They read in the Catholic chapel, which was cold, low slung, made of cinder blocks, with a pure white crucified Jesus on the wall and grillwork visible through the fake stained glass. A lot of the stories were moving; some were unsettling, particularly the ones in which old rages and convoluted senses of causality (as evidenced by the passive tense used to describe killing a friend) lived on and women seemed more like possessions than fellow human beings. The category of maximum-security prisoner did not describe the range of these men. I was most touched by Troy Williams’s straightforward account of weeping when he told his daughter, via telephone, that his parole had been denied. He was fearful of being seen to cry in a tough place like prison, but someone reached out to him, and he found a little bit more humanity than he expected.

“What kind of a prison have I put my child in?” he asked himself, expanding the idea of prison to include the way she was tied to his fate and locked out of his life. My friend Moriah had brought me to the event; she had been the year before and was moved not just by what she heard but by the fact that the small cluster of strangers from outside was about the most significant audience these guys were going to get. She had heard about it because her daughter was in school with a girl who lived in the same household as Zoe Mullery, the creative writing teacher who had for six years or more come once a week to work with these men. One of the men wrote in his biography in the handout we all received, “I picked up a book and was able to depart the brutal confines of the penitentiary, as well as the margins of my depressed mind. Reading became an escape without my actually escaping.”

Zoe later told me that she had once looked at the history of the word free and it might interest me.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, free has the same Indo-European root as the Sanscrit word priya, which means “beloved” or “dear.” If you think of etymology as a family tree, the dictionary says that most descendants of that ancient ancestor describe affection, and only the Germanic and Celtic branches describe liberty. The scholars say

that the word may hark back to an era when a household consisted of the free people who were members of the extended family and the unfree ones who were slaves and servants. Family members had more rights than slaves and servants, so even though “free” in the United States is often seen as meaning one who has no ties, it was once the other way around. Which is another way of saying that freedom has less to do with that Lynyrd Skynyrd “Freebird” sense of the word (in which we don’t care about prisoners or anyone else) and more to do with the idea of agency.

It doesn’t actually matter who did Thoreau’s washing, though I remained curious to see if we knew who that might be. We don’t. But we do know quite a lot about the Thoreau family’s values. The second Thoreau scholar, Michael Sims, had sent me an excellent essay by Sandra Harbert Petrulionus about the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society that the writer’s mother and sisters belonged to, along with Mrs. Emerson, and after the laundry issue was raised on Facebook, I read it again. “The influence they brought to bear on some of America’s most noted antislavery speakers and writers had a pronounced and far-reaching impact,” Petrolonious declares. “Thanks directly to eight women, six of whom lived in his home, Henry Thoreau had long been exposed to the most radical antislavery positions during his formative young-adult years.”

The women seemed to find a kind of liberation for themselves in this movement for the liberation of others; they were able to act independently of husbands and fathers, to take public stands, to become political beings in a new way. The women’s suffrage movement, the first feminist movement, grew directly out of the abolition movement: they went to liberate someone else and found that they too were not free. Thoreau’s mother and sisters were more radical than he was initially; they even publicly supported the “disunion” position that would have had the North secede from the slave South long before the South actually seceded from the North. The Thoreau women were also participants in the Underground Railroad, and Henry David sometimes walked or drove the fugitives northward toward freedom. These Americans cared about prisoners enough to risk their own lives and liberty on their behalf.

A young abolitionist named Daniel Conway describes one such encounter on July 27, 1853, thus: In the morning I found the Thoreaus agitated by the arrival of a colored fugitive from Virginia, who had come to their door at daybreak. Thoreau took me to a room where his excellent sister, Sophia, was ministering to the fugitive. . . . I observed the tender and lowly devotion of Thoreau to the African. He now and then drew near to the trembling man, and with a cheerful voice bade him feel at home, and have no fear that any power should again wrong him. The whole day he mounted guard over the fugitive, for it was a slave-hunting time. But the guard had no weapon, and probably

there was no such thing in the house. The next day the fugitive was got off to Canada, and I enjoyed my first walk with Thoreau.

In this vignette, brother and sister are collaborators in a project of liberation, and by this time, more than fifteen years after the founding of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, Thoreau was wholeheartedly recruited to the cause. A year later Thoreau wrote, “I endeavor in vain to observe Nature—my thoughts involuntarily go plotting against the state—I trust that all just men will conspire.” Many just women already had. And so in my reply to Sims, I said, “Reading that superb piece you sent a month or so ago deepened my sense that his abolitionist mother and sisters were political powerhouses in whose wake he swam. My position now is that the Thoreau women took in the filthy laundry of the whole nation, stained with slavery, and pressured Thoreau and Emerson to hang it out in public, as they obediently did.”

This is the washing that really mattered in Concord in the 1840s, the washing that affected not only the prisoners of slavery, but the fate of a nation and the literature of the century. Thoreau’s writing helped twentiethcentury liberators—Gandhi and King the most famous among them—chart their courses; he helps us chart our own as well, while also helping us measure climate change and giving us the pleasures of his incomparable prose. His cabin at Walden was ten by fifteen feet, less than twice the size of a solitary-confinement cell at California’s supermax Pelican Bay State Prison, though being confined to a space and retiring to it whenever you wish are far more different than night and day. In a sense Thoreau is still at work, and so are his sisters, or at least the fruit of Helen and Sophia Thoreau’s work to end slavery is still with us, along with their brother’s liberatory writings.

Though there are other kinds of slavery still waiting to be ended, including much of what happens in our modern prison system.

Continuing my reply to Sims, I wrote, Thoreau’s relationship to his sisters reminds me a little of mine to my brother, who is a great activist and a great carpenter and builder, a support and ally to me in every possible way, and someone for whom I often cook and sometimes assist in other practical ways. (Though of course in this version the sister is the socially inept writer person and the brother the more engaged activist who leads his sibling into the fray.)

My brother David actually built me a home at one point. In that home in which he sometimes stayed and often ate (and usually did the dishes after he ate), we held political meetings as well as family gatherings. In it, as

before and since, I helped him with activist publications, because for almost all our adult life he has been a political organizer who seems to end up volunteering for publications. We’ve been through three books of his that way, and each of these projects for which I am an informal editor has drawn me deeper into political engagement.

David cares about prisoners and has worked on their behalf many times, most recently Bradley Manning.

Sometimes I’ve joined him. He has often been arrested, spent time in jails from Georgia to Ontario, and is named after our grandfather, who was named after Thomas Davis, the Irish revolutionary and poet. He has provided astute critiques of my writing and ideas, and without him I might have been lost in the clouds, stuck in an ivory tower, or at least less often called into the streets. Though I am the writer, he taught me a word when we were building the home that was mine for a while. The word is sister, which is a verb in the construction industry, as in “to sister a beam.”

This means to set another plank alongside a beam and fasten the two together to create a stronger structure. It is the most fundamental image of the kind of relationship Thoreau had with his sisters and I with my brother: we reinforce each other.

It is what we are here to do, and to raise melons and build houses and write books and to free anyone who might possibly need freeing, including ourselves and the meanings of our lives in all their uncategorizable complexity. By this, I don’t mean freedom only in that sense that many Americans sometimes intend it, the sense in which we are free from each other; I mean freed to be with each other and to strengthen each other, as only free people can.

A Muse and a Maze Peter Turchi [The Writer as Puzzle Composer—and Something More] While fiction writers and their editors bemoan the relatively meager sales of literary fiction, and while poets wonder what they’re complaining about, there are other kinds of books that outsell them both, despite the fact that they are never reviewed and rarely advertised. On any given day, in bookstores but also in grocery stores and in airports, hundreds if not thousands of books are purchased which the reader will give the rapt attention that, we’re told, ordinary men and women once gave the installments of Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop or the latest J. D. Salinger story in The New Yorker.

These books that sell, well, wherever books are sold—and where aspirin, neck pillows, and beach balls are sold—are books of puzzles: crossword puzzles, double acrostics, word searches, cryptograms, and sudoku, the puzzle phenomenon that has had its grip on this country, among others, for several years. While puzzle books might seem to have nothing in common with fiction and poetry, many poets, fiction writers, and readers of literary work are also puzzle solvers. (Some claim, adamantly, not to be; if you’re one of them, we’ll get to you soon.)

The puzzles and games that intrigue writers take many forms. Some notable fiction writers are famous for their puzzling interests: Lewis Carroll was intrigued by logic puzzles, Edgar Allan Poe by cryptograms, Vladimir Nabokov by chess problems, Georges Perec by jigsaw puzzles and crosswords, and Margaret Drabble wrote a combination memoir and history of jigsaw puzzles. It might be more immediately apparent that poetry requires the concentrated attention to composition, the strategic release of information, the insight thinking, and the economy of means familiar to every puzzle composer.

Years ago, when I became the director of an MFA program in creative writing, and before email became our default mode of communication, I had occasion to talk with the program’s academic board chair by phone almost every day. During some of our conversations, I recognized a sound in the background on the other end of the line. I started listening for it, a sound familiar from my youth: the clatter of cards being shuffled, followed by the soft snapping of a game being laid out.

Finally, one day, I acknowledged that I could hear what was going on in the background. I said something like, “How are the cards?” My colleague must have been surprised: she cut off a laugh, and stopped. I never heard her shuffle again. I imagine—though I never asked—that she suspected I might have taken her playing as a sign of inattention, or distraction. And maybe it was. But I have come to believe there is a clear link between the habitual consideration of the strategic arrangement of playing cards and the work we did together.

This colleague of mine was a poet, with a ferocious ear for form and music. She was also quite a remarkable organizer. For instance: for the program’s semiannual residencies, we had to arrange workshops for about seventy students. The students were separated into seven groups. Each student’s work was discussed once during each residency. Two faculty members led each workshop each day. Each student participated in one of these multiday workshops five times over two years. Most people would simply divide the students into groups and pair up the faculty more or less randomly. But my colleague treated the challenge as a puzzle, for which she created the following rules: 1. At any given residency, no faculty member could lead any particular workshop group more than once.

2. No two faculty members could be paired together more than once in each residency.

3. No student’s work could be discussed in workshop twice by the same faculty member during that student’s tenure in the program.

4. No student would have his or her work discussed on the first day of workshop or the last day of workshop twice during their five residencies.

5. All faculty would lead the same number of workshops. (This had various caveats related to other faculty responsibilities.)

Semiotician Marcel Danesi tells us that puzzles are more than tests of knowledge or adeptness; to solve them, we rely most of all on “insight thinking,” which he defines as “the ability to see with the mind’s eye the inner nature of some specific thing.” Those rules for the organization of workshops were not arbitrary; the puzzle had a serious purpose. It seemed unfair for a student to have his or her work discussed on the first day more than once, because on the first day the groups were often just getting up to speed, and on the last day they were sometimes running out of energy. It seemed ideal for a student to have his or her work discussed by as many different faculty as possible, so the writer could hear many different perspectives. And so on. Still, most people wouldn’t have bothered,

in part because not everyone steps back to see the pattern in a particular problem, in part because the puzzle could be difficult to solve. Underlying the puzzle was a critical component of my colleague’s pedagogical beliefs: while, as administrators, we couldn’t control everything, the things we could control would be designed to treat everyone equally. Her attention to fairness in the organization of the groups helped keep the focus on the work being discussed, rather than on whether someone was being favored or disadvantaged by the arrangement of the workshops. Rulebound logic governed the structure of the discussions, and the clarity of that structure was particularly important because what was being discussed—drafts of poems and stories—was unquantifiable, immeasurable. Those discussions deserved everyone’s full attention, so we made it our goal to eliminate distractions regarding the organization of the groups.

Is it too much to say that my colleague’s habitual contemplation of solitaire (and, I later learned, a variety of puzzles in newspapers and magazines) encouraged her to see administrative challenges as puzzles to be solved? Is it so far-fetched to think that a poet who would write a book-length series of sonnets might be inclined to see how other kinds of forms might contain and productively shape less poetic material?

The correlation between certain types of puzzles and, say, forms of poetry is fairly straightforward.

Sudoku – a puzzle that adheres to the following constraints: •

It must be a nine-by-nine grid.

•

The grid must be further divided into nine three-by-three squares.

•

Each cell in the grid must be filled with the numbers 1–9.

•

No number may be repeated in any horizontal line.

•

No number may be repeated in any vertical line.

•

No number may be repeated in any three-by-three square.

•

The puzzle composer omits certain numbers, and those omissions allow for one unique solution.

Villanelle – a poem that adheres to the following constraints: •

It must have nineteen lines.

•

The nineteen lines must be further divided into six stanzas.

•

The first five stanzas must be tercets.

•

The final stanza must be a quatrain.

•

The poem must have two refrains.

•

The poem must have two repeating rhymes.

•

The repeating rhymes must be in the first and final lines of the first tercet.

•

The rhymes must repeat alternately in tercets two through five.

•

The quatrain must include both repeated lines and both rhymes.

This isn’t to say that the tasks faced by the puzzle composer and the poet are essentially identical. The puzzle composer’s only responsibility is to create a functional puzzle (though some composers are much more ambitious). The poet’s task is not simply to fulfill the requirements of the form but to use it to create something unique and beautiful. The point is that, to the extent the formal poet begins with “rules,” or constraints, she has a container to work in and against. While fiction writers may not have the benefit of pre-defined forms (there are no rules for the short story that come near the specificity of the rules for the villanelle), every writer has the option, in every story or novel, to create his own rules, his own form.

Puzzle solvers have their biases. An avid fan of the New York Times weekend crosswords might speak scornfully of those who attempt only the easier Monday through Thursday puzzles; Monday through Thursday crossword fans might belittle those who go no further than jumbled words and their cartoon punch lines; jumbledword solvers can be heard to speak disdainfully of sudoku fans; and any of the above might heap abuse on those calm, methodical people content to circle “hidden” words. But then, diagramless crossword fans don’t think much of the puzzles with black squares, avid followers of composers like Thomas Snyder (“Dr. Sudoku”) have no time for the computer-generated sudoku that fill the airport and grocery store shelves, and people who prefer chess problems know better than to bother with any of them. Peering down on all of this are the aficionados who collect Oskar van Deventer’s mechanical puzzles or who have dog-eared copies of Martin Gardner’s books. This attitude translates as My puzzles offer intellectual stimulation; your puzzles are childish. But there are also people who think, My puzzles are fun; your puzzles are work; those who think, While I’m too intimidated to say so, I don’t even know how to start those puzzles you do; and those who feel confident that All of you people are wasting your time.

That last group includes those who claim to be completely immune to puzzles. But any investment manager, political campaign strategist, teacher creating a test, lawyer framing a case, carpenter framing a house, baseball manager making out a lineup, chef planning a menu, designer laying out a magazine or website, or busy parent trying to coordinate children’s school and soccer schedules is actively involved in puzzle solving. Each task has a goal,

elements to put to use (lumber, players, vegetables), and rules or constraints (time, money, left- and right-handed batters who also need to field), and success or failure is usually fairly clear (either all the children are clothed when they get on the bus, or not). So that last attitude actually translates as something like, I don’t have time for those frivolous puzzles of yours; I’m busy solving real ones. The truth is we all practice for life by solving puzzles of one kind or another nearly from birth. (Who comes when I cry? How soon? To help, or to scold?) We could even say that each of us represents one solution to a puzzle, a unique combination of twenty-three pairs of chromosomes.

Puzzles focus our attention on a select body of knowledge and a single task. To that extent—and to the extent that each puzzle has one or more correct answers—they represent closed systems, and a kind of pure knowledge, a miniature world in which some decisions are right, others are wrong, and ultimately there can be no question about which are which. It can be refreshing to mentally inhabit, even for a few minutes, a world in which a goal and the means of reaching it are perfectly clear, and where our reward is complete comprehension of the whole.

Of course, us being us, as soon as we attain that comprehension, we lose interest. We turn the page.

And there we see the crucial difference between fiction and poetry and puzzles. While composing a piece of fiction is like assembling a puzzle, the finished work is not presented by the writer as a puzzle for the reader to solve.

There may be puzzles within the story, elements of plot or character or imagery or meaning that require the reader’s active participation, but the story as a whole is not a problem with a solution. Like Ariadne’s thread allowing Theseus to journey into—and safely out of—the mythical labyrinth, a story means to lead the reader somewhere. But the destination isn’t a monster, or a pot of gold, or a bit of wisdom. Instead, the destination is something—or several things—to contemplate. The best stories and novels lead the reader not to an explanation, but to a place of wonder.

Nobody Home Gary Snyder in conversation with Julia Martin [excerpt from “Enjoy It While You Can,” Kitkitdizze, 2010] MARTIN: Thank you, yes. To take a different direction, being here at Kitkitdizze makes me particularly aware of your

writing on place. You’ve been one of the people who is defining what we understand by a long-term commitment to a place, and a bioregional awareness.

SNYDER: You know, for you to say that (which I gratefully accept) is also a cultural admission of the fact that we are

an unsettled and disenfranchised people.

MARTIN: Absolutely.

SNYDER: I mean, I’m nothing.

MARTIN: You’ve only been here forty years.

SNYDER: I’m nothing. My ancestors’ bones are not buried here. What do I know? If you want to talk about place, the

sense of place, or the placedness of human beings prior to the mid-nineteenth century, you’re talking about something entirely different that we have almost no idea of.

MARTIN: Okay, I agree. But what you’re doing is an attempt at some kind of reparation, turning things around?

SNYDER: Oh, it’s just my choice. I made up my mind that I wanted to find some place where I’d settle down for the

rest of my life. I didn’t assume that the children would want to stay. And I don’t assume—you can’t make that assumption in the twenty-first century, in this world.

The other side of it is that we are capable of beginning now to think of the whole Planet Earth as our place—which nobody was quite up to before. They didn’t have quite that much information. But saying that is not to free people to say, “I am a citizen of Planet Earth, I am a member of this planet.” They’ve got to prove it. It’s too easy to say, “I am a citizen of the Cosmos, I live in the Universe, I am at home here . . .” Well, come on kid, show me how you do it. So you still can only know place specifically.

MARTIN: In the particulars.

SNYDER: You have to know the particulars. If you can begin to talk about the particulars, you might then be able to

get a sense of what a larger planetary space might ultimately be. So it does come down to starting out with particulars, and being engaged with them. And that’s really hard to come by. With most people you have to just start right out with putting them on the map. You know, which direction is North? And then, what does North mean?

What is North?

MARTIN: What does that question mean?

SNYDER: Which direction is North? What is North? That question means can you answer it, where is North?

MARTIN: Well, I know where it is on the map.

SNYDER: What is it in worldly terms? On the map it’s just up.

MARTIN: Well, I know how the sun travels across the sky, and I get North in relation to that.

SNYDER: The East and West are created by the spinning of the earth. The axis of rotation is what we call North and

South. The projection of the axis of the rotation of the earth in the northern hemisphere is North. It happens to come out very close to a star. It’s not quite on it, it’s just off a little bit. But that’s what North is. It’s the axis of the turning of the earth, and measuring yourself against that.

MARTIN: So for us, where I come from, we need to know where South is.

SNYDER: Yes. The Southern Cross is even further off the axis. One time in northern Botswana, I was looking at the

Southern Cross and actually pointed to the axis of it, like that, and took a line from the stars that were up over the horizon, so I knew where the North Pole was down under the ground. And then I knew that for sure I was on the planet. When I first landed in Japan, in 1956, they happened to have a clear night the first or second night I was there.

And sure enough, I could recognize the constellations. So then I knew I was still at least on the same planet.

Well, those are what the local Palas are all about, the guardians of the Four Directions in Buddhism, and the importance of knowing what is meant by the guardians of the Four Directions. But in Buddhist East Asia they speak of Ten Directions: the four cardinal directions that we are acquainted with, plus the quarters (North-West, SouthEast, and so on), plus Up and Down. That makes ten.

So some of the Buddhist recitations invoke all the Buddhas in the Ten Directions. And the Three Realms: the Realm of Form, the Realm of No-Form, and the Realm of Desire. We live in the Realm of Desire, being metabolic beings, whereas rocks are in the Realm of Form. They have no metabolism.

MARTIN: They just are.

SNYDER: That’s what it seems.

MARTIN: And the Realm of No-Form?

SNYDER: Well, most people have never seen that. That’s Arupa, No-Form. That’s one of those things that when you

get into trying to figure out Buddhist philosophy, you think, Now what do they mean by that? You can find commentaries that describe it, but they’re not very helpful.

So the idea of how you locate yourself is interesting, those cosmic guidances that are given. And then there are the local guidances, which are always: Which way does the water flow? What’s the watershed? Where’s the river

going? The mountains are that way, it’s downhill that way . . . you sort of orient yourself. The watershed is a great way to orient yourself.

MARTIN: And do you think that understanding the particularities of one location enables you then to extend that

further?

SNYDER: Well, then you know at least what you’re looking at. Otherwise you wouldn’t have ever noticed, no matter

where you are. You know what to look around for, and what questions you want to ask. The next step that’s important for people is knowing what the plant life is.

MARTIN: There’s been a certain criticism of the literature associated with place-based bioregionalism, which says that

in North America it sometimes gets too parochial, too insular, too disconnected from the global. But in your work, I think, you can’t make that division. The particularity is there, but if you’re going to think ecologically at all, you’re going to think of interpenetration and flows, and the particular manifesting the global.

SNYDER: Yeah, but you know for a lot of people that doesn’t do a damn bit of good.

MARTIN: Explain?

SNYDER: Because most issues are more local than that. Like the timber issues here are the issues that belong to

mountains (that is to say, there is a fast runoff of the rain), issues that belong to a summer-dry, winter-wet climate, which changes what you can do. And you have to be much more careful in a summer-dry climate because when the winter rains come, they cause a lot of quick erosion in the sense that the ground has totally dried out, and you can lose your forest. In a few decades you can have lost enough soil that you can never get your trees back. That’s what happened to Greece and to a lot of other parts of the Mediterranean. That’s how they lost their forest. They cut too many trees down, and it was impossible for them to regrow because of the rainfall washing out the soils. Plus goats.

MARTIN: After the goat, the desert, they say. They eat everything.

SNYDER: Yeah. And they eat the young trees. They can eat grass and it will grow back.

So I don’t know what the criticism of place is, except a misguided criticism from urban people who are educated and don’t understand that they live in a place, or that it matters.

MARTIN: I think it’s saying that yes, of course, we need to rediscover our locatedness in place, but that global flows

and patterns—political, social, economic, and so on—are inextricably part of where we are as well.

SNYDER: Nobody argues that. But everybody knows those things already and doesn’t know anything about the place.

So it’s not a fair argument, because a lot of people haven’t even given place a start in their thinking. They just come in already with, you know, Western Civ on their minds, and they think that place is for the peasant—the paysanne, the person of the land, the person of the place.

MARTIN: The other day when I was flying here, a daytime flight from London to San Francisco, it was a wonderful

thing to travel over the surface of the planet, see it all for a change from that perspective, that big view—the mountains, the rivers, lakes, fields, forest fires. The world. I kept thinking about your essay on Dogen’s “Mountains and Waters Sutra” in The Practice of the Wild, and also, of course, Mountains and Rivers Without End. It does seem to me that you do it beautifully there: a big view of the whole phenomenal world continually arising, all of it seen as mountains and rivers, a nondual view.

SNYDER: Well, that’s one of the things I’m trying to do, yes. Did you go over Greenland? Isn’t that remarkable?

MARTIN: It is remarkable.

SNYDER: The first time I flew over Greenland, I realized that I hadn’t known how many rocky mountains there were.

Big mountains.

MARTIN: Yes. And even before that, the coast of Scotland was so extraordinary, a very ragged, wild coast, so many

inlets. When we finally got to San Francisco, my initial feeling after all those hours of mountains and rivers and sky was quite negative. Kind of: oh no, look at all these grids that the humans have built. But then the pattern of it all was really so interesting, a fascinating thing this human mind has made, this world of San Francisco.

SNYDER: Or any place.

MARTIN: Or any place, but that was where I was. So I realized again how easy it is, initially, to love the so-called

undeveloped environments of a continent, and to feel a kind of repugnance towards its cities. But actually seeing the patterns of San Francisco from the air, it all looked so intelligent, lively, beautiful even. It reminded me of that poem from Mountains and Rivers, “Walking the New York Bedrock,” where even that city of cities is in a curious sense a natural formation.

So one does have that sense sometimes, that all of it is really mountains and rivers. But can you say something about maintaining such a view?

SNYDER: Well, the watershed goes through cities.

MARTIN: “Rivers that never give up.”

SNYDER: Yeah, for one thing. All cities are part of some natural conformation of the wild, and they are adapted to the

conformation of the land. And they are where they are for some human reason. San Francisco is where you can bring a ship in out of the ocean, and where a great part of the drainage of California comes out into San Francisco Bay, a huge, huge watershed (the San Joaquin Valley to the south, Sacramento Valley to the north). All that is coming out into San Francisco Bay. It’s been mistreated a lot, and the gold-mining they did up here shallowed the bay considerably, but they are still able to get aircraft carriers in, just barely.

To think about cities, you think a little bit about the idea of the mandala, and the uses of human habitation and the possibilities of different sets and structures of habitation, and the infrastructure that brings water and takes

waste away, and so forth. It’s not simple. It’s better done some places than others, but there have been some intelligent and magical—deliberately magically intended—constructions of concentrations of population.

However, it would be a mistake to think that all human accomplishment comes out of those concentrations.

What the intervening lands offer, each in their own way, are particular lessons, including the places that are not suitable habitat for any economy other than hunters and gatherers—they just won’t work for pasture or for agriculture. Like much of the Great Basin of western Turtle Island.

MARTIN: Right.

SNYDER: I talked a little bit about that in The Practice of the Wild, that every region does actually have its own

particular wilderness, which is the wildest place in that area, the least-known place, the place where you can gather wild herbs, the place where the bears are, the place where you go for magic, the place where you go to be alone.

There are two things that are really educational. One is being with a bunch of really smart people. The other is being all by yourself.

MARTIN: So cities are in a sense mandalas, and there is wildness even in the city. On the other hand, for me the point

arises that in order to focus critique, one may also need to define a particular action or orientation as problematic.

SNYDER: Oh that is so . . . French! There is some truth in that, yes.

MARTIN: What I am saying is that from one point of view it’s all mountains and waters, a nondual world, not-two. In

Buddhism they might talk about an absolute view. But at the same time, of course there are other ways of seeing, or focal settings, that might need to see things differently. If you hope to be able to change something, or critique something, or overturn something, then you need to be able to identify what the problem is. And a city may well, to some extent, be manifesting that problem.

SNYDER: Well, everything has its problems. Problems are only a human idea anyway. And yeah, sure, everything is

problematic. If you want to have a problem, there’ll be a problem.

MARTIN: I’m thinking in particular of environmental issues.

SNYDER: There’s only one dualism that counts: Being and Non-Being. When they’re talking about dualism, that’s

what they’re talking about.

MARTIN: Explain?

SNYDER: Everything boils down to either it exists or it doesn’t exist. That’s dualism.

MARTIN: That’s the real dualism, and the others are all constructs?

SNYDER: It’s all ecology otherwise. It’s all interactions.