And what if my whole life, my conscious life, has indeed been “not right”?
It occurred to him that those barely noticeable impulses he had felt to fight against what highly placed people considered good, barely noticeable impulses which he had immediately driven away– that they might have been the right thing, and all the rest might have been not right. …He tried to defend it all to himself. And he suddenly felt all the weakness of what he was defending. And there was nothing to defend.
“But if that’s so, and I am quitting this life with the consciousness that I have ruined everything that was given me, and it is impossible to rectify, what then?” …In the morning, when he saw the footman, then his wife, then his daughter, then the doctor– their every movement, their every word confirmed the terrible truth revealed to him that night. In them he saw himself, all that he had lived by, and saw clearly that it was not right, that it was all a terrible, vast deception concealing both life and death.
–from The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy
At this particularly critical juncture in our planet’s habitability, the head of UN climate talks this year has this to say for himself: “I respect the science, and there is no science out there… that says the phase out of fossil fuels” is necessary to curb global warming.
The man heading the UN climate talks, by the way, also happens to be (and why not?) the chief executive of the United Arab Emirate’s state-run oil company. A coincidence, yes.
///
The supreme triumph of reason, which is analytical, that is, destructive and dissolvent, is to cast doubt upon its own validity. A stomach ulcer ends by causing the stomach to digest itself, and reason ends by destroying the immediate and absolute validity of the concept of truth and of the concept of necessity. Both concepts are relative: there is no absolute truth, no absolute necessity. We call true that concept which agrees with the general system of all our concepts; and we call true that perception which does not contradict the system of our perceptions; truth, then, is coherence, connection.
(…) And so, neither the vital longing for human immortality can count on any rational confirmation nor can reason supply us with any incentive or consolation in life or any true end purpose for it. And yet, here in the depths of the abyss, the despair of the will and of the heart meets rational scepticism and in the encounter they embrace like brothers. And from this embrace, this tragic embrace, that is, this intimately loving embrace, will surge a wellspring of life, a life both true and terrible. It is scepticism, uncertainty, the final position reached by reason in its exercise of self-analysis, the analysis of its own validity, that provides a foundation upon which the heart’s despair must build its hope.
Miguel de Unamuno, “The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations,” p. 116-18
Part of the reason I’m posting these pictures now is because I intended to before the snow fell. Now it’s either too late or my last chance. I am still reeling from the suddenness of our first winter storm, and tripped up in my sense of time. Was it really just a week ago that I was riding a bike around Yellowstone in a t-shirt? Okay, a week and a half, now.
Butterflies might be the last animals on most people’s’ minds today. But I’ve been putting my time in with ghoulish book subjects for a couple months now, and I’m here to tell you, there’s a connection. In Serbia the hawthorn stake used to dispatch a vampire is called a glogovac. The name is directly borrowed from their word for a type of butterfly we don’t have in the United States, the black-veined white. What’s more, more historic vampires have been thought to turn into butterflies than bats. As the scholar Paul Barber wrote, “This notion… seems at first glance to be hopelessly opaque.” But both butterflies and vampires are capable of transformation. The conditions for vampirism are thought to be closely related to the state of one’s soul– an entity that is associated with butterflies as well, as in the Greek word psyche, which is used for both.
Influenced by Barber’s excellent book “Vampires, Burial, and Death,” I’m coming to understand the folkloric vampire as a personified fear of death, especially the fear triggered by the decay of a corpse. People tend to see life and death as discrete categories and it can be unsettling, even threatening, to see the two overlap. This has been illustrated most dramatically over the millennia when people have been forced to confront corpses in states of advanced decomposition: they might look well-fed (because of bloating), with blood around the mouth (pressure in the thorax is vented up the airway), and surprise them with uncoagulated blood and a lack of rigor mortis– both things that can happen naturally. In short, there is life there– the bodies are, after all, exploding with microscopic lifeforms. Such unexpected discoveries, paired with some notion of the transmissivity of death (as historically it has so often involved contagions), ascribed a malevolent agency to the gruesomeness of decay. As Barber at one point concludes, “It is probably not going too far to suggest that a vampire might be defined as a corpse that comes to the attention of the populace at a time of crisis and is taken for the cause of that crisis.”
Why might the black-veined white be the butterfly of choice? Barber doesn’t get into it, but I like speculating: pale skin, darkness running through the veins. Many of the most surprising features of vampire-associated corpses are most prevalent among people who die suddenly. Also overrepresented among this category of the dead: “the veins beneath the skin of the body generally become prominent as a bluish-brown network.”
My butterfly pictures at top illustrate nothing of the sort. They are all Vanessa cardui, painted lady. I’ve tried to get pictures of them (opportunistically, with point and shoot cameras) for years, and somehow, this fall, almost every time I went to Yellowstone one of them held still for me. Now, in a different sort of transformation, their autumnal world of orange-lit meadows and a few off-timed flowers is deep in snow.
the elk hunt
///
///
///
///
Mountain climbing, sense of place, and a book that I’ve been crazy about for a long time, now:
https://mountainjournal.org/seen-from-above-mountain-climbing-select-peaks
the tea cannery 