Friday's Question

What is a book, a child, and nature? Class is in one hour, so forgive my short answer. I think that each is a source of life, a genesis of animalistic tendencies just waiting to surface. As the child matures, nature blossoms, and the book is read, each is somehow symbol for regeneration, a renewed life cycle. The book changes the way we see the world by recreating dead metaphors, nature grows and dies with each season, and children, a little rose bud, the first word of a novel, begin the cycle all over again. Old archaic notions of spontaneious generation believed that mice came from soiled clothing and wheat huskes, maggots were spawned from rotting meat, geese from pine resin and sea salt, frogs from river mud, rats from garbage, aphids from morning des, and Eve came Adam's rib. Its interesting though, when we consider the eating of meat in nature and life cycles and circular, repetitious relationships, Ovid, as we may recall said, "Come, all of you who claim mortality should look on meats as poison to your bodies--unholy fuel to feed unholy fires. Here are the fruits of life--of field and orchard. Even Hitler had very stringent animal protection laws, such as: It is frobidden to put out one's domestic animal for the purpose of getting rid of it. Richard Brautigan once wrote a poem wherein he witnessed a Livingston man abandon his dog on the side of the road. Well, in revenge, Richard followed this guy home and the next day dumped a truck load of chicken shit all over his front yard. It would seem, given these few examples, that nature is to be respected, and children as well of course. I think that a book is an agency of respectfulness, wherein we may describe how interesting creatures seeming come from nothing its justification from the innocense of children. Below are some stanzas from a W.B. Yeats poem in the summer issue of Lapham's Quarterly:

Out of Nature

I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
--Those dying generations--at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect

II
An aged man in but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its moral dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have saild the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium