A few years ago, when I first started researching and writing about fascism in my own family, a friend of mine asked me why I couldn’t just stay with my island writing, the adventures and reflections of an innocent time. Why must the story of Eden be about the fall? Couldn’t I just keep it as it was?
But the truth is, I couldn’t write those books and columns today. The circumstances have changed dramatically. The country and the world I live in are different places.
Undoubtedly, the most important answer to my friend’s question is knowledge, which brings many things, including, above all, a heightened awareness of dissonance. It sounds tragic, but maybe it isn’t. If I refer to the trusty dictionary which, along with my dog-eared thesaurus, I’ve kept with me since high school days, I realize that it is only through dissonance, that something new can emerge.
“Dissonance n an incomplete or unfulfilled chord requiring resolution into harmony.”
Today, I continue to live on this small pile of rock and sand, once the head of an ice-age mountain ridge. On morning rounds to the bee hives, the farm, and the greenhouses, it is impossible not to notice the heightened stress. The thirsty birch trees settle for less water and turn yellow long before the autumn. A buck freezes only a few meters away from me, with nowhere else to go.
Seeing paradise lost all around me, I searched, and my eye hit upon tendrils, reaching out to one another and other plants and objects, helping all the plants upward. It wasn’t survival and art, rather survival through art, which is singular, but cannot grow on its own, and, in reminding us of the incomplete, completes us in a never-ending, boundless process.
Thus The Tendril.
Here is the poem that hatched the idea, written through the month of August, after each morning of observing my small world in all its bittersweet beauty and then returning to my study. There is dissonance, but in it, there is a call to something else.
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Tendrils hold one another,
timeless art expands my split second—
Margot Fonteyn’s arms pushing out the borders.
A bee burrows into a cucumber flower,
deliriously clear,
moisture dampens the buzzing.
STOP A heat wave hits three continents STOP More than 100 Barbie dolls are sold every minute STOP A global warming “tipping point” is closer than once thought STOP
Raindrops jump on the lake’s surface,
a tern hunts in thunder,
while a heavy-headed rose bows under the downpour.
Miniature frogs take to the paths,
pilgrims among the slick leaves,
prophesying autumn.
STOP As the world boils, a backlash to climate action gains strength STOP The hottest July STOP Why Barbie Must Be Punished STOP
The aroma of tomatoes is stark and forbidden,
a wild aphrodisiac,
making roots heave.
The sting of nettle drowns in the rotting,
needles dissolve
into a smoothie for the soil.
STOP Trump is crushing GOP rivals STOP Barbie on Bitcoin STOP Elon Musk’s geopolitical clout STOP
Beans bend the corn,
in tangled, heavy stocks,
submitting to gravity.
Golden hairs—a child’s or a witch’s? —befuddle the ants
over sheaths of white kernels
protected by a stiff green glove.
STOP Trump is indicted, again STOP Elon Musk on ‘white genocide’ STOP Summer of Barbenheimer STOP
Under the succulent grass is the straw bed,
a memory of the summer’s moods,
cushioning the earth.
Chantarelles defy the contraction,
African ochre in the musty decay,
skirts of whirling dervishes.
STOP How Quran Burners Got the Global Attention They Wanted STOP A Wedding Pushes Through Despite Floods STOP What’s in Trump’s Head STOP
Honey oozes through the sieve—
wax, pollen, and the dead,
all, work for ants.
Too-slow or too-fast, too-long or too-short,
nonsensical in the sweet lava—
yearning toward sugar crystals.
STOP Ukraine and Russia expand the battlefield STOP Can carbon dioxide removal save us? STOP Barbie’s 1 Billion Dollar Box Office Haul STOP
Morning brings the rhythmical rounds—
stir the honey, water the greenhouses,
clear the debris, rinse off the dirt.
Relinquish the conquest!
Spiderwebs will be cotton candy in the corners,
butterflies will leave their eggs in the kale.
STOP Disaster in Hawaii STOP What Should You Do with an Oil Fortune? STOP She Wants to Burn Down Hollywood STOP
Warmth returns,
feeding the illusion,
a dream of never-ending summer.
Bushes re-bud—could play be forever? —
but the gentle air holds the tension,
tired flowerpots betray our make-believe.
STOP Ukraine’s War of Attrition Draws Parallels to WWI STOP Death Toll in Maui Wildfires Rises to 89 STOP Gen Z’s Housing Anguish STOP
Wasps lick wood,
hungry for the cracks
in a life of twenty-two days.
Hornets scavenge for light,
under the window latticing,
sun-seeking tourists.
STOP America’s Obsession with Monster Trucks STOP Trump Hit with Racketeering Charges STOP The Ruble is in Rubble STOP
The mature sun’s glory
bleaches highlights in the birch,
stroking the greying water.
The roses try for another round,
but their flowers are small, their scent timid
in air that smells of burnt sugar.
STOP See the Powerful Storm’s Latest Path STOP India’s Moon Landing Sets the Tone for A New Type of Space Race STOP Trump Inflated Property Values by $2.2 Billion STOP
The storms have come,
but the morning’s immersion continues—
The wind slices off the tips of waves, freshening my face.
The summer is over, but there is still time,
always time, neither friend nor foe,
a condition that softens us.
STOP Punctuation is too expensive STOP We don’t have time for it STOP We’d like to stop STOPPING, but we can’t STOP