Evolution and the Gods

My think­ing goes like this: When we began our exper­i­ment with Total­i­tar­ian Agri­cul­ture (grow­ing & domes­ti­cat­ing all we eat, then stock­pil­ing and pro­tect­ing it) we started exert­ing pres­sure on evo­lu­tion. Total­i­tar­ian Agri­cul­ture inter­rupts Nat­ural Selection’s penal­iza­tion of bad genes in the pool, in this case, the ones that say “keep breed­ing.” This can only end badly.

What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

Toward the end of Pat’s book, Wee­t­a­moo has some hard con­cerns about writ­ing, itself. Young Meta­com has learned to write the fig­ure A. He pro­nounces it for her, and explains the white men’s util­ity in writ­ing  –  and the Indian need, there­fore, to be con­ver­sant in it. I had to stop read­ing a while after I saw her response: …What if, when­ever we wanted a story, we could just reach out and read it from a paper, instead of wait­ing for the right time and place and the right sto­ry­teller to tell it to us? As it is with us now, when we learn a story, we must hear it again and and again, and repeat it to…

Next Levels of Dramatic Irony

Your expe­ri­ence as a stan­dard reader: Toward the end of Pat’s ren­di­tion of Weetamoo’s diary, the sachem-​​​​to-​​​​be is finally called for her adult­hood rite. The year is 1654. She’s been antic­i­pat­ing it most of the book; she’ll spend sev­eral days and nights in a sweat­lodge, tend­ing a fire and wait­ing for con­tact from the non­ma­te­r­ial world. In her two visions, a deer she’d uncer­e­mo­ni­ously killed leads her through the win­ter night to an impor­tant fish­ing area to the Pocas­set, down­stream from a water­fall. The sec­ond night, the deer leads her to an impor­tant fish­ing area, down­stream from a water­fall, where she encoun­ters older ver­sions of her­self with Meta­com, her sis­ter, and child. Meta­com is paint­ing blood­root on their…

The Time Traveler's Sketchbook

The other day, leav­ing an explana­tory com­ment at a fel­low his­tory blog, I real­ized I haven’t talked much about time travel here, or my love of it. There’s an increas­ing amount in the Dredge uni­verse, from the metaphor­i­cal (non-​​​​chronological sequence of poems) to the insis­tently lit­eral. And Back to the Future to Abo­rig­i­nal con­tentions that all time is present-​​​​time, I’ve been drawn to it in incar­na­tions my whole life. Every time travel story sets its own para­dox para­me­ters. Back to the Future relied on the over­clocked Doc Brown to help Marty return from the Mul­ti­verse. The Time Traveler’s Wife asked which lover, Henry or Claire, met the other first (to the exclu­sion of nearly all other con­flict). Primer seemed obsessed with measuring…

I miss you, Pat

I’m read­ing my late editor’s Wee­t­a­moo (pro­nounced Weh-​​​​táh-​​​​moh) book, Heart of the Pocas­sets. It’s a heavily-​​​​researched, 95% imag­ined diary of the Pocas­set sachem at 14. Pat wrote it for Scholas­tic, for those lucky eighth-​​​​graders with an Indian His­tory unit. It’s sim­ple and refresh­ing, if light-​​​​weight for my needs. An easy lit­tle recap after the over-​​​​saturated and dis­turb­ing Mayflower. Weetamoo’s par­ents man­date that she find time each day to learn patience. Because the his­tor­i­cal Wee­t­a­moo didn’t read or write (her cul­ture didn’t use those tech­nolo­gies) it’s a sort of live-​​​​feed from her med­i­ta­tion time. After chores, and episodes with friends or neme­ses (like that ras­cally Wamsutta and Meta­com), she dwells a lot on the tribe’s prac­tices. Some­times it’s…

So Many Questions

Almost done with Mayflower. Help­ing me: I know a tremen­dous amount more about the region and the 17^th cen­tury than when I started. Not help­ing me: the absence of infor­ma­tion about the area I’m most inter­ested in. This morn­ing I’m look­ing for a map (or five) of tribal lands in 1605 (and 1620, 1650, 1675, 1690). I just want to know the names of what and who the hell I’m look­ing for. This absence of acces­si­ble infor­ma­tion may be a core moti­va­tion of my book, but it’s pro­foundly frus­trat­ing now as it was five years ago. Few peo­ple care about the losers, fewer about the lit­tle guys, and almost no one cares about the lit­tle guys…

Plotting

Today I decided to sketch the plots of the remain­ing poems in Trib­u­tary Dredge. It seems a not intim­i­dat­ing way to reen­ter the writ­ing process after a few months’ gen­uine vaca­tion. I’ve never tried to hone sev­eral plots simul­ta­né­ously, and the result is both reas­sur­ing and star­tling. On the one hand, I think this will be a use­ful approach-​​​​tool when the time comes to work on the remain­ing sec­tions. On the other, things here are turn­ing from the strange, through the bizarre, to the insane. I fig­ure they’ll get reigned back soon enough, but for now, worlds and time bound­aries are dis­solv­ing. The kids are meet­ing one another at dif­fer­ent ages. There’s a pur­pose to…

Interdimensional

First, a new broad­side is up at Face­book. Head over and grab your free poem! Sec­ond, I’ve been think­ing a lot lately about the broth­ers of Fresh­wa­ter Dredge and Well­wa­ter Dredge. I tend to think of them not only as real peo­ple, but liv­ing in a dimen­sion par­al­lel to ours. Though they’re the same age, one grows up in the 80s, the other in the 60s. Of course it hap­pened by what we might call the Clarke-​​​​Twain Prin­ci­ple of revi­sion. Beside all their other uncon­ven­tional inter­ac­tion with time, by grow­ing up simul­ta­né­ously in dif­fer­ent decades, they’re rec­on­cil­ing diver­gences in the revi­sion process itself. I think that’s pretty neat. It also makes me take the sequence of their…

Sudden Waking

Yes­ter­day an acci­den­tal phone call woke me at the wholly unciv­i­lized 9:00 hour. (It was a Sat­ur­day, and I’ve been woe­fully under­slept, c’mon.) I was in the mid­dle of a dream that strik­ingly resem­bled another from within six months, and very close to being caught where I wasn’t sup­posed to be, which may have meant some long-​​​​sought answers. The details aren’t impor­tant  –  I’m sure you don’t hon­estly care  –  but it prompted me to ask a neuroscience-​​​​inclined friend about a the­ory I’ve been brew­ing for a few years. It’s been reported all over that in terms of neural activ­ity, dreams last between three sec­onds and about ten min­utes. My friend tells me the aver­age REM cycle lasts within thirty…

The Packrat and the Taxonomist

Two things: 1. I’m a sworn pack­rat. I’ve only ever defeated the instinct with greet­ing cards, which after read­ing I have no idea what to do with, and while trav­el­ing for long peri­ods. 2. Some­thing my 9^th grade Eng­lish teacher/​​10^th grade advisor/​​3-​​​​year var­sity foot­ball coach (I was the man­ager) said once that I’ve never for­got­ten: “We remem­ber things because we assign them mean­ing.” Like every­one, I have a store­house of child­hood mem­o­ries I can’t explain. That is, I can’t explain why I remem­ber them. When some­one invokes steal­ing cook­ies from the jar, I blank to a 1955-​​​​ish cli­part boy with a duck­tail and short shorts, one hand behind his back. It’s this way for most…