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The Vines

It seemed like a good deal. We’d cut back the vines in exchange for rent.
We developed a technique – you mow, sort of – use a machete, cut the vines several times from high to low and then across the base right above ground. Push them over with your foot and start again from the top. The first year we did pretty well – cleared more than half an acre before spring, mostly from around the house. You could almost imagine a yard. A house with a yard. But I was worried, too, about paying the rent. We were getting it done too fast.
Late winter I started mowing the bare patch to keep the new shoots down. Took the mower out every few days, set it as high as it’d go and run it over the dirt. Found a lot of rocks. At the same time we went back to work swinging at the wall, cutting it back. The bottom of the vines here were tougher. The mower got into trouble when I tried to move into the new territory. It was taking hours. So I gave up mowing and just started weed whacking them down after I mowed. Every day, once spring really set in and the shoots started up. Turns out you don’t kill them at all when you cut them back like that. They just send out new shoots from the root.
You can imagine, it got to be something of a battle. I should have rented a backhoe but I guess I thought of it too late. We started digging at the roots and pulling them up. Then, as the weather warmed we saw something amazing. The roots sent out new shoots. The more we tore up the roots, the more they sprouted. Seemed every tiny bit of root we missed sprouted into a new plant. The large woody rhizomes we were pulled out became a fine mesh that permeated every bit of soil like a fungal net. with little green leaves at every edge.
I’d like to say we kept at it. And we did but frack we were doing this for eight hundred a month in rent. I know people blame me for what happened but I’m ok with that. I swear to god I saw one vine grow thirteen feet in one day and there were thousands. Our assault on the wall faltered while we fought to keep the ground we had taken and then one day the mower broke down. We’d hit too many rocks for the blades and wrapped too many vines around the shaft for the bearings and it basically seized up in a ball of smoke. I left it out there. They swallowed it up the next day, like they wanted it. It took me couple days to get a replacement but by then there was already no point, really. It became a defensive fallback from that point on.
I know you’re saying I’m ascribing intentionality to a plant. We want to see intentionality everywhere, like seeing the face in the flame, the old woman’s silhouette in the cliff face. Those plants came up through that mower and over it and they were wrapped around it’s wheels. The tires were already flat like they’d been eaten by mice. I didn’t even think about freeing it. We had bigger problems. Every one of those little shoots had sprung up to something thirteen to twenty feet long. They were back.
They headed for the windows.
I know “ the vines developed to a point where they lodge and the structure became involved”. Bullshit. There were vines all around the house and they were leaning every which way as long as that direction was the house. I started whacking vines back from the windows but they just seemed to keep coming. The baby’s room was first. We woke up one morning and the vines had grown up in his room like a bassinet. His crib was suspended in an egg shaped creche with razor sharp thorns. We crept in, took him from the crib and left. The fight was over.
The next night we spent on the couch. In the morning our room was gone.
It’s been several days. We appear to be at detente. The vines haven’t taken any more of the house. Almost like it was tit for tat. They haven’t moved up the hallway. We can still get to the bathroom. The vines inside the house aren’t getting a lot of sunlight. They’re yellow, spindly. Once winter comes and the cold, we’ll probably be able to take back the bedrooms.

Hailey, Idaho

We stayed in the house where Ezra Pound was born. It was a bit of a surprise. Nobody had told us anything about it. We found the address they sent us to and drove around back through the alley to carry our stuff in so it was a while before Tracy opened the front door and stepped out to look at the front yard. She was coming back in when she stopped and said “you should take a look at this”. And there it was, a brass plaque:
birthplace
Of
Ezra Pound
the poet
October 30, 1885
“I have beaten out my exile”
The house is a display space and while we were there it was empty in front except for unused display podiums. In the back there was period furniture and a bookshelf filled with biographies and Pound criticism with a bronze on top that I thought of as a death mask. Tracy was almost certainly right, though, Ezra was old when he died – he wouldn’t have looked that good. It was a face casting but of a younger Pound, still alive, maybe before he went off the deep end.
He was one of those slavishly Eurocentric types of turn of the century provincial American culture. Someone asked me why he was thought of as an American poet (not an American himself) and I had to agree. Pound was trying not to be. Where he went wrong was he made a little money, got some famous friends and decided with no justification that he could be an economist. Even then, you couldn’t be taken seriously if you unthinkingly held several mutually exclusive ideas within one or two short paragraphs. Might work for a poet but economists were trying to be consistent with their ideas. So the more serious types stopped returning his letters and Ezra fell in with the crackpots and conspiracy mongers.
Still, his racism wasn’t totally out of band for the time. We need to acknowledge that. Benito Mussolini was a columnist for the Hearst syndicate until 1936 and he ended the relationship. He was probably busy invading Abyssinia. Pound was living in Rapallo, a nice seaside place on the northwest coast of Italy. He liked Benito. Benito was down on the gays and busied himself shipping them off to an isolated group of islands in the Adriatic. It wasn’t until he signed up with Hitler that Mussolini became seriously dangerous for Jewish people. Ezra was already there.
In a beautiful example of the critical analysis he brought to economics, he declared,
“When speaking of the Protocols alleged to be of the Elders of Zion, one is frequently met with the reply: ‘Oh, but they are a forgery.’
Certainly they are a forgery, and that is the one proof we have of their authenticity. The Jews have worked with forged documents for the past twenty four hundred years…”
When the United States went to war with Italy, Ezra put on his black shirt and sat at his shortwave and broadcast to the American soldiers words that were meant to weaken their resolve, to turn them to the Axis cause.
After the war he said “I consider genocide impractical and admit, in theory, that every man should be judged after his own merits. But…”
It’s odd staying in a museum. Like camping in a wilderness but of intangible history embodied in objects or like artifacts of a dream. I started feeling the tremors of the war around me. I don’t worry about ghosts and wasn’t thinking that maybe I’d see old Ezra come down the banister. He was only three or four when they moved to Pennsylvania so it would be a really small ghost anyway. But he was a big fucker and bad and deeply involved in the war and I could feel that.
I thought about setting up a tent in the front room and camping like we were in Yellowstone but then we’d have to make a fire. Smoke damage, burn marks on the floor. I’m really not into tagging anything so huge.

get in touch with god, turn your radio on

My first real job out of high school was at the naval shipyard in Bremerton, Washington. For a while I was assigned to a dedicated computer facility specializing in spectroscopic analysis of metal samples taken from the reactors and missile tubes of the boats that came into the yard for service. This was ’75 or ’76. The computer was a wall of switches, needle gauges, tape and card readers that filled most of the room. It was a Univac, as I remember, Sperry Rand, with what we would call ‘reprogrammable gate arrays’. Meaning you could open panels and manually move switches around to change the way the refrigerator sized CPU dealt with instructions. Men would come and go with stacks of cards and reels of magnetic tape while I sat at a desk that looked out over the ferry dock toward Retsil, across Sinclair Inlet. My job was to position the metal sample in the test chamber, lower the carbon rod and push the button. Ten thousand volts would pass through the giant pencil lead, vaporizing the sample. A beam of light was passed through the resulting metallic cloud, splitting like a rainbow. The computer with its light sensors analyzed the rainbow and determined the chemical composition of the sample to ten thousandths of a part per million. I was also responsible for the accounting and activity logs.
Several samples would usually come in every day but the task was pretty straight forward and often there was no work. They wouldn’t let me run my school code on their multimillion dollar super computer so I had a lot of time on my hands. I would sit at my desk watching the ferries and seagulls, doing college homework and writing.
One day a group of engineers came in acting oddly, a little giddy. They huddled together and whispered until I asked them what job they were working on. I was supposed to put it into the log. I mean, I didn’t care, I was supposed to write it down—government, you know. It was immediately clear that whatever they were doing was unauthorized and that I was a problem. I held up both hands in surrender and pointed to the log. The computer would record the CPU time (there was a mechanical odometer just like a car’s on the main panel) and Arnie, our boss, was pretty diligent about the accounting. Budgets had to be charged. They huddled again and Randal walked over and wrote down a project code for me to transcribe. It was for development, internal. His hand actually shook a little as he wrote it down. His name went into the log next to the charge code and time. They returned to their project and I returned to reading my book.
Whatever they were doing took some time. They were inside the machine moving things around and checking notes, recording changes. You really wanted to be able to restore things when you were done. Finally one of the guys unloaded a card tray into the reader stack. Paul. They all stepped back. Randal called me over, he said “You want to see this.” Back then, the way the cards slipped into the slot and then flew out the other side seemed like prestidigitation, like a super fast card shark flipping a deck two feet tall. The first part to go in was the static instructions, writing down addresses for the panels of hand soldered chips. At that time microchips were just breaking into the one kilobyte per chip stage and this was a true Large Scale Integrated system, four thousand chips on a board. The next set was for the computer’s second generation microprocessors—if this, do that sort of stuff. Then the reader paused. Someone nodded to someone else and someone pushed the button to load the program. The reader flipped a hundred cards, paused again and then began tearing through the stack at impossible speed. Two of the guys jumped suddenly, one reached over and steadied the card reader while Bob picked up another card tray and held it so the cards fed onto the top of the stack. This was an extremely risky maneuver—think about a modern copier, you could get things out of alignment and something would catch or crumple and this was an ancient mechanical speed machine. It also meant this was a very large program.
Everyone stood and watched the reader. It got close to the end of the stack and paused again. The last cards went through more slowly, ticking and whirring, stopping and starting. Finally the last card went through, there was a pause and the computer beeped.
Bob reached up, pushed the Run button and the computer spun up like a helicopter, or a generator coming to life. He reached into a pocket, pulled out a small AM radio, turned it on and held it up to the computer, right over the CPU. The radio played Beethoven. It was coming from the machine.
They had arranged and programmed the processor circuits to operate in loops, throwing off EMF at different amplitudes depending on the size of the loop. There was popping static as the gates opened and closed but the music was there, correct and unmistakable. The program on the cards was the actual score of ‘Ode to Joy’ transposed to a sequence of numbers.
The music was a true epiphenomenon, a collateral product that could not physically effect the physical machine that caused it.
But what if. Speaking of consciousness, if the function of the machine is to produce the music, could not the music be sensible to the machine? What if the brain could listen to its own music? Might not the brain, then, alter the music by opening and closing gates and pathways through its neural circuitry? So the epiphenomenon becomes an integrated reflector in a feedback loop that alters both the music and the brain. This is what we experience as consciousness, the self and sensation that cannot be pinned to any one place in the body and is, yet, inextricably bound to the flesh and fluid from which it emanates.