Interlude

From Maggie Nelson's latest book, Bluets:

67. A male satin bowerbird would not have left it there. A male satin bowerbird would have tottered with it in his beak over to his bower, or his "trysting place," as some field guides put it, which he spends weeks adorning with blue objects in order to lure a female. Not only does the bowerbird collect and arrange blue objects—bus tickets, cicada wings, blue flowers, bottle caps, blue feathers plucked off smaller birds he kills, if he must, to get their plumage—but he also paints his bower with juices from blue fruits, using the frayed end of a twig as a paintbrush. He builds competitively, stealing treasures from other birds, sometimes trashing their bowers entirely.

The Bower Bird, Ch.II

I am going to give you
a new melodic conception
on a tune you are familiar with. If we overlook
such exceptional movements as earthquakes,
hurricanes, storms, avalanches and waterfalls,

nature is silent. This is very exciting,
because mankind has always thought about being
invisible or having invisibility cloaks. Also, I think
knowing the weight proportionality of body parts
would be important if you needed to dismember
and dispose of a corpse. Everyone wants to be
nice to the animals. Most people are not

willing to pay $300 for a salamander. We know
it's a hard idea to get used to, but
there's no lush gift shop waiting for you at the end
of this museum. The significance of those prints
for human evolution has been debated
ever since. But at least in principle, a perfect forgery
could be a new and important work of art.

The Bower Bird, Ch. I

You say you are
a nameless man. But
the counterintuitive reality
of multiple minds in a single person
is one most people resist

given that they feel themselves
a singular “me.” For instance,
patients whose brains have
been damaged so that their
two hemispheres cannot
communicate with one another
will consistently fabricate elaborate
explanations for why one isolated
hemisphere acted in a particular
way. And it's not because there’s anything
wrong with them, but because
they were conditioned

to believe that learning is about giving back
the right answer. The effect is especially powerful
if you blink your eyes. As a result,
we hear "dog" and think of nouns
that, in more sober circumstances, would
seem to have nothing in common. These
depressions just smother you. And yet,
students of bird song notice that
certain species at certain moments just go out
on a jazz musician's jam session, taking notes
from other bird songs
and incorporating them into their own,

singing much more beautifully
than when merely demarcating
a territory. This repetitive, cumulative, 'continuous
dynamic' painting process is strikingly similar to the way
patterns in Nature evolve. Common sense is nothing

but a collection of misconceptions acquired
by age eighteen. We don't need to 'stabilize' on
anything: the virtue of this medium is unfettered
diversity. Aristosthenes's only tools were sticks,
eyes, feet, and brains; plus a zest
for experiment. The basic idea is to get two spheres
and put some electric charge on them.

The Bower Bird

It's been nearly a year since I last posted any work here. There is good reason for that: most of it is crap. But, instead of burying my head in digital mulch and pretending I've never been (or still am) terrible, I'm leaving it as a document of what is generally called "juvenilia".

Having addressed that, I could also justify such a decision to leave it in place as a sort of foundation for all my subsequent writing. Sure, whatever works.

To be totally honest, I'm reappropriating this site as a host for a new project I have called The Bower Bird. Problem was there are already blogs with that address so «zip!» I'm right back here. Perhaps I'll post other work alongside the structure being constructed, but decisions like that will be made later, and on the fly.

Tomorrow, 18 March 2010, a member of the family Ptilonorhynchidae will begin construction. I don't know where this will head, only that it should be fun. The premise should become obvious in short order, but the practice will be ongoing and subject to change (possibly without notice, even to myself).

Oh, and one last thing, this isn't an attempt to attract a mate. The lovely one I have would likely disapprove.

Hope you enjoy what follows. Or at least find it interesting enough to keep an eye on...