the webbing of a hundred roots.

Ich kreise um Gott, um den uralten Turm,

und ich kreise jahrtausendelang;

und ich weiß noch nicht: bin ich ein Falke, ein Sturm

oder ein großer Gesang.

[…]

Doch wie ich mich auch in mich selber neige:

mein Gott ist dunkel und wie ein Gewebe

von hundert Wurzeln, welche schweigsam trinken.

Nur, dass ich mich aus seiner Wärme hebe,

mehr weiß ich nicht, weil alle meine Zweige

tief unten ruhn und nur im Winde winken.

The only poetry book I took to Romania this autumn was Rilke’s Stundenbuch. I love the following:  ‘yet no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots, that drink in silence’. I cannot say how much.

I rage a lot, I push and thrust and burn and break down. I seek to understand with all my powers. but I cannot grasp what is beyond the little logic I stumble with. Love in the dark. What if it is so.

What if it is so that That Which Sustains Life must remain within the glorious haze, within the earthen scented soil, within the tissues of our hearts that may never truly understand. What if it is so that That Which Sustains Life adores riding me through shuddering waves of regret and valleys of emotional rage and through the still deserts of my crumbling sanity. What if it so that his is Her cruel though dead effective way of making me cross thresholds that I would not cross in my fear and lowliness. Transformation is no longer as threatening looked at this way. I embrace uncertainty, I make you the only still centre in the universe. The one miraculous spot where the pendulum hovers and shivers.

I accept. I accept the storms and the darkness and the sweetness of the contraries they promise.

I am leaving tomorrow. Taking the long way to America.

hummingbird, hover.

i had a dream of hummingbirds. i don’t know where they live but these 2 poems are sweet.more on hummingbirds here.

Questions of Travel (Elizabeth Bishop)
There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
- For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains
aren’t waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theaters?
what childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?

Oh must we dream our dreams
and have them too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely, it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
- Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country, the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have an identical pitch.)
- A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
- Yes a pity not to have pondered,
blurr’dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful, finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
- Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds’ cages
and never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politician’s speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

“Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one’s room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there…No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?

and of course:

The Hummingbird (Emily Dickinson)

A route of evanescence
With a revolving wheel;
A resonance of emerald,
A rush of cochineal;
And every blossom on the bush
Adjusts its tumbled head, –
The mail from Tunis, probably,
An easy morning’s ride.

elinor ostrom.

something i forgot to mention when it happened. this is slow news station, welcome, earthling.

her work should be more widely read, although her (and williamson’s) reception of the nobel prize in economics has not been well-received by the community of economists. bad practice not to read outside of your own discipline and saying that she’s not a ‘real economist’ anyway. here  she is presenting some of the ideas her work is based on. her work on common property, cooperation, and trust is a fundamental contribution to studies of institutions and is highly relevant for anthropologists similarly interested in how ordinary people organize themselves to manage their shared resources.

ach, to graze only within your disciplinary boundary means to be condemned to specialist narrowmindedness. geoff hodgson has collected the admittedly very mature reactions to the news of her and williamson’s prize here. more available – email me.

just as a reminder that anthropologists have something to say to the world, in general. we just have to find ways in which to present this, and not be afraid of our expertise. (thanks sophie)

photo: reuters

Candide a lui Voltaire trimite salutari.

With luck and persistence, you will be able to claim the rewards promised you at the beginning of time–not just any old beauty, wisdom, goodness, love, freedom, and justice, but rather exhilarating beauty that incites you to be true to yourself; crazy wisdom that immunizes you against the temptation to believe your ideals are ultimate truths; outrageous goodness that inspires you to experiment with boisterous empathy; generous freedom that keeps you alert for opportunities to share your wealth; insurrectionary love that endlessly transforms you; and a lust for justice that’s leavened with a knack for comedy, keeping you honest as you work humbly to liberate everyone in the world from ignorance and suffering.

adieu au grand claude lévi-strauss.

more here.

circles.

it’s been quite a rollercoaster to come back. not only did many people die in the village, but people seemed more destitute than two years ago in a weird way. of course, this is hard to assess in only two weeks, but this is the impression i got. what a horrible country. Part of me cannot wait to get away from here, and I can soothe my anger in some moments with the idea that I will leave in a months time. I am not sure what to think of that, but I just feel things are going quite wrong on all kinds of levels. And my anthropological hat doesn’t seem to fit at the moment. It’s itchy and I tend to fling it across the room or at a passing car, then picking it up and brush off the dust.

I still get quite emotional and everything affects me, but, strangely, I am no longer up for letting it make me stressed up to the point of illness. May be that makes me a bad anthropologist. I don’t know. The thing is that I’d much much rather be doing something that would make more sense to more people than anthropology. Trouble is now I have acquired (or well, will do sometime in 2010) this training for academia, and I didn’t focus on any other work for 4 years. So I feel like I am at a breaking point, as this still hasn’t been resolved. I am not sure if I am up for the race of 4-5 years spent in 5 different places.I think my health and sanity would break for good.

So I am thinking of moving to a place and then getting a job… but it’s all a bit much to deal with at the moment. I am not the best person for this job, as I’d much rather have my routine and my proper diet, and proper exercise possibility.  I hope it will be ok. I am adamant I will keep my sanity this time. I cannot sacrifice everything for this job, this time round, like I did during my doctoral fieldwork.

pictured: stanley henry morton with pithhelmet (a kind of archetypal anthropological hat)

right livelihood awards 2009.

David Suzuki (Honorary Award, Canada) “for his lifetime advocacy of the socially responsible use of science, and for his massive contribution to raising awareness about the perils of climate change and building public support for policies to address it”.

Three recipients receive cash awards of EUR 50,000 each:

René Ngongo (Democratic Republic of Congo) is honoured “for his courage in confronting the forces that are destroying the Congo’s rainforests and building political support for their conservation and sustainable use”.

Alyn Ware (New Zealand) is recognised “for his effective and creative advocacy and initiatives over two decades to further peace education and to rid the world of nuclear weapons”.

Catherine Hamlin (Ethiopia) is awarded “for her fifty years dedicated to treating obstetric fistula patients, thereby restoring the health, hope and dignity of thousands of Africa’s poorest women”.
Unlike the Nobel Prizes, the nomination process for the Right Livelihood Awards is open.  “Anyone – except Right Livelihood Award Jury and staff members – can propose anyone (individuals or organisations), except themselves, close relatives or their own organisations to be considered for a Right Livelihood Award. The Right Livelihood Award Foundation reserves the right to refuse clearly unsuitable proposals.” http://www.rightlivelihood.org/guidelines_english0.html

Jakob von Uexkull created these awards because he “felt that the Nobel Prize categories were too narrow in scope and too concentrated on the interests of the industrialised countries to be an adequate answer to the challenges now facing humanity”. http://www.rightlivelihood.org/history.html
Congratulations to the winners!

leaving scotland.

Leaving Scotland before the driech of November is difficult. I have come to love the crisp clarity of early autumn that many writers have taken as all that is most beautiful before it dies, all that is ripe before it is decaying. It is the point of balance that we all want to capture at its peak and prolong to infinity. We are desperate to learn about how the apex of maturity forms and builds up. We are less keen on experiencing how the coating on the shiny, tough edges start to peel. As rust builds underneath the surface, we may pass off the minor changes in skin texture as mere tiredness.

I miss you too much and the autumn mornings cannot soothe.

robert graves.

Just came across Robert Graves. Fascinating man. I love this poem. More of the sort here.

TO AN UNGENTLE CRITIC

The great sun sinks behind the town
Through a red mist of Volnay wine….
But what’s the use of setting down
That glorious blaze behind the town?
You’ll only skip the page, you’ll look
For newer pictures in this book;
You’ve read of sunsets rich as mine.

A fresh wind fills the evening air
With horrid crying of night birds….
But what reads new or curious there
When cold winds fly across the air?
You’ll only frown; you’ll turn the page,
But find no glimpse of your “New Age
Of Poetry” in my worn-out words.

Must winds that cut like blades of steel
And sunsets swimming in Volnay,
The holiest, cruellest pains I feel,
Die stillborn, because old men squeal
For something new: “Write something new:
We’ve read this poem—that one too,
And twelve more like ‘em yesterday”?

No, no! my chicken, I shall scrawl
Just what I fancy as I strike it,
Fairies and Fusiliers, and all
Old broken knock-kneed thought will crawl
Across my verse in the classic way.
And, sir, be careful what you say;
There are old-fashioned folk still like it.

40 years this month.

no woman ever walked here. image rippled from the guardian.