A modest proposal

 One argument for gun control is that this country has the highest rates of gun violence among wealthy, developed countries. It’s a comparison among peers.

Maybe a better argument would acknowledge that some countries have higher rates of gun violence. Some of the rates in Central and South America are spectacular. And we could be like them — if we gave up on the idea of regulation and just let everyone shoot it out as each saw fit. We could also be like Japan, England or the other countries that have stricter laws and lower rates of violence.

It seems obvious to me that we not only have a choice, we have a range of choices. We could put ourselves anywhere on a spectrum from Japan to Nicaragua.

Many of my neighbors in Georgia see no choice. Any regulation would infringe on freedom, a sacrilege. Regulation is not a matter of choosing policy but of betraying values.

Since we’re divided, and gridlocked by our division, I’ve been wondering what would happen if we incorporated a feature of ancient democracies: the lot. Suppose we cast lots. If the advocates of gun control won, they could add five proposed laws to the books. If the opponents won, they could remove five laws from the books.

We’d cast lots each year, and we’d allow ourselves to be steered by lot, since we are incapable of doing the job. We’d go a year at a time with new laws and we’d note whether we had more violence or less, whether we became more like Japan or more like Nicaragua and El Salvador.

I think we’ve become so wrapped up in our politics we have lost the ability to see cause and effect. That is, we’ve lost touch with reality. Would regaining that ability be worth the bloodbath?

Do you think it would be hard to convince our fellow citizens to give this proposal a chance? Leaving the safety of innocents to chance would strike many people as monstrous. But if you ask me, that’s exactly what we’re doing now.

Apalachee High School, the site of the latest tragedy, is 33 miles from the front porch at Stone Mountain.

Panola Mountain, early September

 The leaves are beginning to turn in The Piedmont. Sourwood trees had some red leaves in August. Now you see branches of red leaves on otherwise green trees. You see yellow on sycamore, sweetgum and tulip trees.

Muscadines are yellow to gold. Sometimes, you can pick out long vines by following the trail of gold on green high into the canopy.

We had a week of cool weather in August — lows in the 60s, highs in the 80s — but summer returned. Thursday was cool again.

We have walked around the upper end of Alexander Lake at Panola Mountain State Park many times. On Thursday, we went around the lower end, exploring. The trail disappeared along the way, but fishermen had made paths.

On the north shore, dandelions, sunflowers, vervains and late boneset were blooming. Butterflies were everywhere.

One to keep in mind

 People say that an old man can’t learn poems by heart, but I learned this one over a cup of coffee: 

The fish has too many bones

and the watermelon too many seeds.

 

Maybe a 12-word poem is cheating. But I think of my gold star for memorization as one of the benefits of reading poems that don’t make the textbooks.

This one is by Charles Reznikoff and is called “The Old Man.” I’ve reached the age where I need to have it in memory as a talisman against the kind of grumpiness that finds fault with watermelon.

• Source: Poems 1918-1975, The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff, edited by Seamus Cooney; Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1996, Vol. 2, p. 104.

W.H. Hudson on birdwatching

 W.H. Hudson, the naturalist, once went to St. James’s Park in London because he wanted to see birds. He saw a girl of about 10 who was showing two younger children the geese. The girl’s joy was obvious. Watching birds enlivened her in some way. It made her feel more alive, more connected to life. Her enthusiasm struck Hudson. 

The picture was in my mind all that day, and lived through the next, and so wrought on me that I could not longer keep away from the birds, which I, too, loved; for now all at once it seemed to me that life was not life without them; that I was grown sick and all my senses dim; that only the wished sight of wild birds could medicine my vision; that only by drenching it in their wild melody could my tired brain recover its lost vigour.

 

Hudson acted on that thought. He found a village that was a 20-minute walk from a station an hour from London and spent some time there.

I think watching birds is good for your mental health. I think this would be a better country if we could teach our fellow citizens to watch birds. 

• Source: William Henry Hudson, Birds in a Village; Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, and London: Chapman & Hall, 1893.

 

Ironweed

 A stand of ironweed is flowering along the Yellow River. The blossoms are magenta, I’d say, although I’m not a good source on color. The stand is full of bees, butterflies and wasps. Among the butterflies were giant swallowtails, the largest butterflies in North America. The average wingspan is 5.5 inches.

This stand is Vernonia gigantea, giant ironweed. It couldn’t be anything else. Some of the plants are 12 feet tall.

When I looked for information, I found a source that said Vernonia gigantea grows up to 7 feet tall. Other sources said 8 and 10. Finally, I found that the horticulturalists at North Carolina State University said these plants grow to 12 feet. It felt odd to shop for an academic source to support my observations, but I think anyone who had ever played basketball would have kept looking. These blooms were above the rim.

Under longleaf pine

 When I was young, I climbed a sand ridge that rises out of the Neches River Bottom in East Texas.

It’s called Upland Island. You go from swamps and alligators, dwarf palmettos and towering cherrybark oak onto a dry, sandy ridge. On top are stands of longleaf pine. Longleaf pines grow far apart, and since light gets beneath the canopy, tall grasses surround the trees. The grasses were belt high in places, head high in others.

I sat under the pines and looked up through the branches into the sky, watching white clouds drifting. They’d formed over the Gulf of Mexico and were headed to Oklahoma.

It seemed a good way to spend a day.

The poet Pattiann Rogers wrote of a similar experience under a ponderosa pine. She said:

 

Earth and human together

form a unique being. A brief era

of immortality is lent to each

by the other.

 

I’m not sure about the brief era of immortality, but I do have a memory, one’s that surprisingly clear, surprisingly undimmed by age.

• Source: Pattiann Rogers’s poem “This Little Glade, Remember” is at the Poetry Foundation’s site:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47642/this-little-glade-remember

Jim Harrison on his religion

 Jim Harrison devoted a chapter in his memoir to the troublesome notion of “private religion.” He said: 

I daily wonder if the bedrock of my own private religion is fear and incomprehension.

 

He didn’t question whether his religion existed or was real. He worried about what it looked like.

Harrison supposed that wonder or awe — a helpful quality for a writer — is just curiosity, and that curiosity might be the foundation of his religion. It’s the kind of curiosity that allows a person to hold many questions in mind without forcing an answer.

He collected sacred objects as he went. His examples were from nature — a feather from a crow.

He stuck closer to poetry than to theory.

A good friend and I recently talked about Harrison, agreeing that he wrote some good things and that he could be bloody-minded.

• Source: Jim Harrison, Off to the Side; New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, p. 120.