Ancient Trees and Underbrush

For a brief interval in my childhood my father smoked a pipe. One of my earliest memories is of visiting a small tobacco shop watching him go through the process of selecting the right blend of leaves and finding the proper resulting aromatic scent. The air was always dense with various fragrances—from a sharp cinnamon to a drowsy oak. A forest of impressions. Dad always chose a vanilla-apple blend, a scent somewhat similar to the sensation of burning leaves in October. The store was kept in warm shadows, from the dim lighting to the dark colored woods making up the counters and shelving—the proprietor always conscious of the specific conditions of the rooms to ensure longevity of the leaves.

This memory only explains further why I venture into coffee shops and tea aisles in markets— a flooding over of the olfactory senses successfully reminds one of the details of the past.

In fact, used book stores and university libraries produce the same results for me these days—a slight sensation of falling, dropping back into personal history—especially the older books, the leather and cloth bound books which have texturized bindings marked by use over time. I miss the row of used bookshops I visited in Saint Louis in the Nineties—each visit produced a treasure hunt for an unknown item, the unanswerable curiosity of the week.

Today I fall into these recollections due to the fact I finally found a copy of a text casually mentioned by Isabel Allende in her essay: “The Jungle Queen.” In midst of her exploration of the Brazilian Amazon and within herself, she casually states: “Finally I understood the meaning of the last line of a famous Latin American novel: ‘He was swallowed up by the jungle.’” Although she never mentions the title of the work, nor the author, with the help of a few students I at last located an English translation. Ironically, none of the anthologies which list the essay never follow through with research to explain Allende's reference. This in itself is one of the problems I have with many college textbooks these days. However, I finally discovered that the book Allende refers to is titled La vorágine (The Vortex), written by José Eustasio Rivera and set in the Colombian jungles during the decade of the Twenties.


Finding an English translation of the book seemed impossible. Thankfully, after a month or two, my local library found a copy and now I am lost in the middle of the plains of Colombia following the treks of the protagonist Arturo Cova as he searches for some sense of inner peace. He does frustrate me however. Cova is displayed as a very emotional, reactionary man— very self-centered, egotistical in a vain-youthful manner. But a good protagonist is supposed to show a different perspective on life. Through Cova's complexities the reader develops a stronger understanding of a portion of the South American experience.

The translation of José Eustasio Rivera phrasings does manage to convey a strong sense of the poetic nature of book. Furthermore I can see why Allende references it within her own essay. A commonality of intention exists in the creative presentation of the topographical landscape within South America.

Which of course is what I venture into myself every now and then, losing the self in a landscape of an imagined region, in a wilderness of one’s own creation. I have been lax with creating new poems for the project series Grackle, Fox, and She-Bear, but the full forest of poems sits in my head ready to be slowly presented— I often picture Brendan as he works his way through the ancient trees and underbrush, encountering a variety of creatures and obstacles within the resulting verses. With a better layout of my time, I should be able to approach the full labyrinth of ideas again, fairly soon.

Yet another resolution: break down the sensations for all projects under development: one-by-one, poem-by-poem, progress towards the full idea.