Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird's heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas voladores, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.
Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmetcrests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant's fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.
Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles -- anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures more than any other living creature. It's expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.
The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It's as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around in it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest mammal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.
Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.
So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.
Monday, December 4, 2006
From Brian Doyle's The Hummingbird, to be published next year
Wednesday, August 3, 2005
Back in the US of A
C'est la grande question, la seule, au fond celle que j'ai toujours entendue même lorsqu'elle n'était pas formulée, et quelquefois aussi je l'ai posée--les mots, les yeux--, d'autres fois non ou bien murmurée, juste pour voir, juste pour savoir--mais souvent non, souvent tue, réponse non sue, inventée, suggérée: est-ce que tu m'aimes, est-ce que c'est de l'amour, ce que tu éprouves, ce que tu dis, ce que tu fais, est-ce que c'est de l'amour, est-ce que c'est l'amour?
--Camille Laurens, L'Amour
Sunday, May 22, 2005
A Thought From Lake Michigan
The trick is that you take your hands and make a frame through which to see the world. Survey the entire horizon through that frame, slowly. In each crest and fold and dip and wave of life in front of you, there is a place that is yours. All you have to do is step through that frame and claim it.
Sunday, January 16, 2005
Saturday, January 1, 2005
A New Year
It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.
--Alan Cohen
Sunday, August 8, 2004
Compilation
Like Robert Frost said...
The house had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
Like a pistil after the petals go.
The barn opposed across the way,
That would have joined the house in flame
Had it been the will of the wind, was left
To bear forsaken the place's name.
No more it opened with all one end
For teams that came by the stony road
To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs
And brush the mow with the summer load.
The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.
Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm:
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.
For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.
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The barn and tavern are about 50 yards apart. The cemetary is up the hill, about 250 yards, overlooking a ravine that leads to the river...
the view up into the rafters...
part of the cabinet that was part of the schoolhouse in the upper room of the barn...
more of the cabinet...
the cabinet, with all its worn colors...
somewhat disconcerting discovery on the top floor of the barn...
perhaps someone who IS well-versed in country things can tell me what kind of farm machinery this is...
old nail and chains hanging from it, next to the uhh...wagon?
close-up of the front of the wagon-like thing... note that the wheels on the front are super sharp.
this mystery dial was on the front of the mystery machinery...
sunlight peeks through into the barn...
the rear view of the adjacent tavern...
the upper rear window...
the layers of paint peel off a window sill of the tavern...
a shattered window and glimpse inside the kitchen...
a better shot of inside the kitchen through the broken window...
the view of the barn from the tavern...
the front of the Cross Keys Tavern (operated as tavern from 1809-1820, schoolhouse where friend Amy's neighbor was instructed thereafter, currently maintained by Camp Kern(??))
John and Osee Terry's headstone, (one of the best in condition there)...
typical rural Ohio, this schoolbus is in the woods, visible from the cemetary...
Henry Stibbs' headstone, seemingly very successful farmer, the father of John Stibbs, grandfather of Jackson Stibbs, would outlive most of his grandchildren as he lived to the remarkable age of 98. Walked through his old property today...
These two headstones were near the Stibbs' plots, the names are illegible, but these red silk flowers that some person left there mark the graves...
Sunday, May 2, 2004
The Incomparable Knowledge of Mary Poppins
Bert: You've got to grind, grind, grind, at that grindstone.
---
Mary Poppins: A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.
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Mary Poppins: First of all, I'd like to make one thing perfectly clear.
Mr. Banks: Yes?
Mary Poppins: I never explain anything.
---
Mrs. Banks: Though we adore men, in-di-vid-ual-ly, we agree that as a group, they're ra-ther stu-pid.
---
Mr. Banks: Kindly attempt not to cloud the issue with the facts.
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Mr. Banks: Have this piano repaired. When I sit down to an instrument, I like to have it in tune.
Mrs. Banks: But George, you don't play.
Mr. Banks: Madam! That's entirely beside the point!
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Mary Poppins: In every job that must be done, there's an element of fun. Just find the fun and--snap!!--the job's a game!
---
Mary Poppins: That's a piecrust promise. Easily made, easily broken.
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Jane: Good morning Father! Mary Poppins taught us the most wonderful word!
Michael: Supercalifrajilisticexpialodocious!
Mr. Banks: What on earth are you talking about? Super-super-or whatever the infernal thing is.
Jane: It's something to say when you don't know what to say!
Mr. Banks: Yes, well. I always know what to say.
Thursday, April 1, 2004
April Fool's
I didn't want realism anyway; I wanted things to be highly coloured, simple in outline, without ambiguity, which is what most children want when it comes to the stories of their parents. They want a postcard." --Margaret Atwood
My parents were engaged today, 21 years ago. My dad hasn't changed his style. Of course he'd propose on April Fool's Day. Oh, Dad. My mom sent an email completely reliving the moment and their celebration dinner that night at The Casbah, down on Clark. Sometimes I forget my parents preceded me. I love being reminded by them that they did. I love knowing that even in this area, my parents were here. It gives me even more reassurance that I'm not out of my element, being six hours away from home. Even Bennison's, where they bought their wedding cake, and Seville Flowers on Sherman, where they got their flowers for both their wedding and my baptism, are just a hop down the street. I love knowing this. I want to go to my old neighborhood and walk around. I clearly remember the stones that lined the street. I bumped into one when learning how to ride my bike--light lavender, a plastic basket adorned with a yellow and purple flower, and training wheels. I also remember them from Halloween, when I wore a dirnel, not that I knew what it was then. I held onto my sister's hand and jumped up on them as she swung me up by my arm. That night, I shoved my arm into a paper grocery bag, got it cut close to the armpit from trying to reach into the bottom. I managed to pull out M&M's. They came in boxes then. Dark brown boxes that had the logo printed diagonally across the length of it. My dad said he'd eat all my candy. I didn't realize he was joking, and ate as quickly as I could from my own bag. Everything fades from there into the burnt, scratched and tarnished wood table where I sat at the head, kneeling so I could reach it.
Saturday, February 21, 2004
New Book
"How could we keep it (creative power) alive? By using it, by letting it out, by giving some time to it. But if we are women we think it is more important to wipe noses and carry doilies than to write or to play the piano. And men spend their lives adding and subtracting and dictating letters when they secretly long to write sonnets and play the violin and burst into tears at the sunset."
--Brenda Ueland, "If You Want to Write"