Over here on Planet Nancy I’m remembering a Sunday morning, the second or third day of a four-month stay in the Haitian countryside. The day I met Zakari and he gave me The Look, probably not the first time someone did that—it’s certainly happened since—but the first time I noticed.

I couldn’t speak the language yet and was awkward and unsure of what to do with myself, running on a high level of trust—that in time I would learn to bob along in the stream of daily life. Living in someone’s home–a tiny concrete house, 8 people. Somewhat less cramped than it might seem, because most of the activity of the household took place outdoors. Like the rowdy confusion the mother of the family was overseeing, getting the kids bathed in buckets and dressed in the clothes she laid out for church.

That’s when Zakari, a cousin, wandered by. In his twenties, perhaps. A machete hanging loose in his enormous hand. Lean like a panther. Corded sinew stretched over knobs of bone.

He was here to meet me. An obvious opportunity. Maybe I would take a liking to him, feel a family connection. Work could develop. Maybe I would take a special liking to him and all sorts of economic possibilities would develop. Even if none of that happened, it would be more interesting to know me than not, because I was a foreigner, someone new. Everybody in the area was coming around to check me out by engaging me somehow, so they could see how I would respond. When I was the center of attention, unable to talk, and didn’t know what was going on onlookers were entertained.

So my mind was probably racing a mile a minute, straining for the details to track, working out a theory of the situation, reviewing my options for what to say next or if I should be doing something else now, and what was I going to do all day and giving myself pep talks to keep the old self-esteem up and calm myself down.

That’s when Zakari saw a dead spider in the corner by the step and scooped it up onto the side of his machete to show me. He said it was a krabzarayen. “A spider as big as a crab,” to my ears.

I had already met this spider when it crawled into the middle of my room in the middle of the night and died, and I wanted to know if I escaped a serious bite or if these enormous hairy spiders were something I’d better start getting used to.

So I asked—or thought I asked—“Can those things hurt you?”

“Nah,” he said, “That thing can’t hurt you, it’s dead.”

And then I thought I asked, “Yes, but the ones that aren’t dead, can they hurt you?”

That’s when he gave me The Look, a certain kind of double-take you would give while trying to reconcile how much you thought you wanted this person to favor you, with how appallingly stupid they are. These white people, so weak and strange—can’t talk, can’t work—look at their hands!—so much money—they all have cars—they make airplanes for god’s sake!— You might get ahead if you can make friends with one—but the effort is huge—is it really worth it?

He heaved a sigh and failed to keep the exasperation out of his voice, enunciating every careful word. “That thing is dead. When a thing is dead, it stays that way. Dead things don’t stand up and be alive. Ever. That spider is not going to hurt you.”

The weather forecast is telling me to settle in for a winter storm, so Planet Nancy made a docking maneuver at the public library to get provisions.

One of the books I brought home is called, Design in Nature: How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology, and Social Organization. It’s by Adrian Bejan, a scientist, and his ghostwriter, J. Peder Zane and promises to engage the non-scientist reader from the first sentence to the very last word.

From the book jacket and first few pages, I’m able to glean that “flow” is a central concept in the book. Inside live plants and animals, stuff flows, always. When the flow stops, the thing is dead. This is also true of river systems, the book says. As well as lightning bolts. And committees.

The book will equate the presence of flow with the presence of life and propose a law of physics that says flow is always trying to maximize itself and that’s what drives the evolution of everything from cells to social organizations. Ambitious stuff.

Some of the chapters are called, “Why Hierarchy Reigns,” “The Design of Academia,” “The Design of History.” Others have names like, “The Birth of Flow, ““Witnessing Evolution”, “Seeing Beyond the Trees and the Forest.”

I’m willing to give this book a read. Or a start. Get far enough to have (or despair of having) the experiences promised by the back cover: “never look at the world the same”, “blow your mind with fresh interpretation.” That would be a cool thing to do in a snowstorm.

A story from the introduction explains the value of using the “constructal law” to consider and interpret phenomena that have flow. The soil scientist Robert Elmer Horton spent years gathering data from maps and in the field, counting tributaries and river channels and finding that regardless of the river system, every main stream tends to have about 4 tributaries. With a little bit of pencil and paper work, flow scientists were able to calculate the same result, prompting the musing that, “No doubt, Horton’s empirical work made it easy for us to verify our findings. But had he known about the constructal law, he would not have had to perform innumerable measurements to reach the same conclusion.”

That reminds me of the scene from Saint-Exeupery’s The Little Prince where the Little Prince declines a pill that would make it so he would never be thirsty again, saying that he’d probably only use the time he saved to take a pleasant walk to a well and have a cool drink.

And it reminds me of this astonishing piece of paper I hold right here in my hand because when I saw it I so couldn’t believe it, that for proof I ripped it out of Sky Mall, the in-flight magazine for shopping at cruising altitude. It’s an ad for a Double Dance Mat, 39.98, ages 5 and up. In the picture, it’s a colorful piece of plastic that spreads on the floor and somehow uses two “C” batteries to show nattily-dressed multicultural children how to dance. A tableau of such rollicking good behavior! The headline reads: “Develop basic dance skills the best way—without distracting music!”

Ever since I read God is Red  by the late Native American scholar Vine Deloria, a central thesis of that book has swirled over the horizon of Planet Nancy from time to time to say, “Remember me?  What do you think?”  In God is Red, Deloria maintains that the thing that has impeded genuine communication between white Americans and Native peoples is a difference in worldview.  The worldview of white folks, people like me, says Deloria, is anchored in time, whereas the worldview of Native Americans, people like him, is rooted in space.

Sounds great.  Sounds cosmic.  But what does it mean?

A worldview situated in time, says Deloria, is one where people understand themselves in terms of history.  We believe in history.  We believe that the universe had a beginning and that it is marching towards its end, and we believe in the tale of humankind on the planet as progress that history records and remembers.  There is a segment of time we call Prehistory. That’s the time before anything important happened, before people even figured out that they were people, before the story got itself off the ground.  Ever since history has been rolling, it’s been an epic battle between forces of good and evil, where moral people must step in, “make a difference,” influence the way that the story plays out.

We live in space, too.  We have physical bodies, and everybody’s gotta be somewhere.  We certainly relate to the places where our lives occur and believe our lives deepen when such a relationship has a chance to develop.  But can your relationship to a place be so important that it’s okay to ignore the flow of events in other times and places?  It sounds like a way to get gobbled up by history.  Because that’s my worldview.

When my worldview is looking for information about a person’s relationship to place, it might ask, “Where are you from?”  It wants to know where your personal history started.  A worldview anchored in space might ask a question more like, “Where are you of?”  wanting to know about the ecological space you participate in, the web of interdependencies.  A person is one part of a self-sustaining place, past, present and future.  It’s not history—it’s a clot of aliveness, a big shimmering glob of being.

My worldview isn’t impressed.  It says that such ideas about space belong to another time.  Space is not thick with active relationships.  It’s simply there.  The space around us does not sustain us.  Resources do that, resources that we carve out of whatever spaces they happen to be in, and move them to the spaces where we happen to be.   My worldview lets me carve myself away from space, all but the space required to store my body, a body I can send to the sunbelt if it’s too cold and off to climb a mountain when I need a vacation.

You can’t do that with time—carve yourself out and put yourself back in somewhere else.  Not in my worldview you can’t.  There, time is stable and everything inside it says put.  My worldview says that in space, your bones will molder, at best get taken up by grass or a tree.  You want to be somebody, go down in history.  My worldview promises that in the end, that’s the last thing that will be left.

Sitting over here on Planet Nancy, I’ve been remembering Doorknob, a card game we used to play—my two siblings and I, my parents occasionally, and most importantly, a guest.

We’d be playing hearts or bridge at the kitchen table, strewn, in the earliest days with cokes and popcorn, and later with pizza and beer.

Somebody would cast out the bait.  “You don’t play Doorknob, do you?…  Nobody seems to know it around here…  We only get to play when we go to Our Cousins…  It’s too complicated to try and explain….”

Once the mark is caught, the dealer wheels cards out to everyone around the table, a few face up, a few more face down.

We walk through a couple demonstration hands, everyone playing slowly, showing their cards, taking turns helping out the newcomer. “OK, with a hand like yours, the first thing you want to do is call a heart-color split.  See, you’ve got these 5 hearts.  As long as you’re holding at least 5 hearts, you can use all your black cards for wild cards and connect a bunch of stuff all together.  So if you’re going to discard, discard diamonds.”

What the guest doesn’t know is that all the rules and all the play of Doorknob are invented on the spot.

“If you notice that all four aces have been played, you call ‘Dramamine Ace!’ and then everybody exchanges two cards with the person across the table and you get a free discard.”

After a suitable period of instruction, a dealer sits back and shuffles with a ready-set-go in the eye and announces that now we’ll play for-reals, but we’ll still try to go slow.  Cards flick and snap.  “Neptune!” someone might call, and inform the visitor, “Now everyone’s gotta pass two cards to the left.”

Across the table, lines and fans and stacks of cards shrink and grow, until someone slaps down a winning card, calls “Doorknob!” and explains the arrangement of cards on the table in front of them.  “See, I made a Timbaroo backbone all the low numbers, and then everything else is built onto that.”

Playing Doorknob was probably the most collaborative thing we siblings ever did together.  Even my little sister got to call Doorknob! sometimes—because if she didn’t win, too, she’d tell the secret.  She’d usually crumble when she showed her cards, not knowing how to invent an explanation, so we’d help her out:  “Yup, yup, I see what you got going here.  You took these two pair and matched them up with the other cards by making a Silent Transform.  Good job!”

Gifford Thompson, one of my brother’s buddies, got to be better at Doorknob than anybody.  He asked a lot of questions and clarified the rules, studied them up into a kind of system, practiced at home. When Gifford was there it was more fun just to shove our cards around and not call Doorknob! our eyes flickering with complicity, while Gifford played—skillful, determined–until he turned over the climactic card, knew exactly how to play it, threw it down, leaped from his seat and called “Doorknob!”

Lucky Gifford, the radiant winner.

So lucky to live in a chemical town, this

number of PhDs and forty-seven Protestant churches

A mother’s smile:  decisive and weak.  Ooh, the library…

 

The people that work in the plant and live on

certain streets.  People in certain positions making

napalm making silicone making gravy making

 

National Merit Scholars.  You can advance

to a certain job, but never a certain

subdivision, and you mind your own bridge club.

 

So smart to live in a chemical Town, a place

awash in answers, cubic feet and storage

tanks,  pipes, over and under

 

the road, the plant, unknown to a single

mind—they make all the aspirin in the world.

A university town is like a chemical

 

town.  Such glass in the library, lotta

degrees.  Streets tree-line decisive, good

schools, swimming pools, houses with

 

pillars.

Certain neighborhoods.

Certain heights.

 

Doan rattle dem bones dem bones dem

dry bones dem

cry bone thigh bone

counten on a live bone

lip bone tickle bone

moan woan moan

 

skinny bone to bear bone

scatter speckle crone

bone snare zone

phone home lone bone

prone bone shine alone

 

who loves the blown moan

thrown throne, grown

stone upon stone

on loan, on bone, what we own

 

All this week on Planet Nancy, syllables rained from the sky.

I read a book that said it’s good to write

some fourteen lines of iambic pentameter twice

or three times in a day and see how quick

you find that all your thoughts and talk and dreams

are blurts exactly ten syllables long.

Tuh-DUT tuh-Dut tuh-DUT tuh-DUT tuh-Dut.

It seems a little singsong.  Hard to do.

Not exactly natural to me.

Discuss iambic pentameter in

iambic pentameter and you’ll say,

“Iambic penta-meter’s what we need.”

Shakespeare wrote whole plays like this—and sonnets—

“the quality of mercy is not strained”

“shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

Don’t mimic Shakespeare, simply try it out.

Driddle out some lines, see what you say.

A dozen now and fourteen later on.

At first you’re counting words on both your hands.

And then you mind’s a ticking metronome.

Whose often silly syllables can bounce

an Anglo Saxon haiku out.  Like this:

 

umbrellas under Easter Sunday rain

I think you’d want to know that Mom is dead

consume an omlette cracked from pilfered eggs

an empty slate just like your backward town

thank you sir, and tell me—how’s your wife?

without recourse to money or a phone

you broke my heart I should have dumped you then

now we must import our daily bread.

puh-BUM ti-DUM dum-DEE dul-DEE dul-DUM.

If this is dreaming we should all wake up.

The poet Carl Sandburg wrote that “arithmetic is where numbers fly in and out of your head like birds”, and if that’s the case, I thought maybe I’d try and trap me a few, grow them out, see if I can’t raise my own flock of numbers here on Planet Nancy, because I am always looking for ways to be less dependent on the vagaries of the marketplace and fragile oil-based transportation networks.

Growing your own numbers is ideal for the beginning do-it-yourselfer.  They are compact and various, have few predators and require little, if any, maintenance.  There’s no evidence that they shrink or expand in extreme temperatures, nor do they settle in shipping.  Numbers aren’t prone to repetitive-use injuries.  They neither hibernate nor go dormant, and are fertile 12 months of the year.

Millennia of observation in the wild suggest that numbers, overall, are docile and easy to handle.  All numbers come when called, although more than a few of them have names that would take longer than the estimated age of the universe to say.  Ease of calling is the reason most growers cite for giving their numbers nicknames.

A number will always roost in the same spot—on an imaginary piece of string called a numberline.  This string is without width or depth, as are the numbers, which line themselves up along its length in order of their size.  They are roosting and see no gaps, you know they are all there.

On the rare occasions when a number goes missing, it can always be found by counting to it.  Many growers count by 2s or 100s or gazillions, whatever is required to save time.

Because no one has yet succeeded in raising a full flock of numbers in captivity, questions do remain about housing.  How long a piece of numberline string must you get to hold the entire flock?  How much space does it take up when it is rolled tight? What about when it’s fluffed?  Can you see to the other side when you look through it?  Growers are encouraged to participate in networks and newsgroups to help one another sort these things out.

Fortunately for the new grower, it’s not hard to start a flock when we live in a day and age where numbers are just about everywhere for the taking.  They course through the air, and can be written down with tens and elevens, tally marks, cuneiforms, and hieroglyphics.  You can find them in libraries and stores, on the insides of wires and bathroom stalls, anywhere they have logarithms and divide-by-two.  Go local—educate yourself about the most commonly used numbers in your region and choose those with qualities you admire.  Don’t get carried away with exotics, but include a few if they appeal to you.  Once you get them settled in, be prepared for the young flock to grow.  Numbers reproduce sexually and asexually, and can be planted, hatched, or propagated from cuttings.

I wonder how many generations it really would take to raise a compete flock, one with all the numbers, or at least a representative sample, enough to know whether numbers raised in captivity can ever be as robust and diverse as the ones from the wild.

And I wonder, if the fools who seem so bent on the destruction of humankind succeed with their project—what will the last people who are alive count?

Sitting here on Planet Nancy, I’m remembering a concrete room in a tropical country in the middle of the night after I got up to pee, came back in, clicked off the flashlight, put it on the windowsill, fell back in bed, pulled the sheet over me and was floating back into a doze when a question rang in my awareness.

“What was that on the floor?”

The pull of sleep answers, “Oh, just some leaves or something that came in on your shoe.”

I drift further in the current of oblivion and then the next question rings me alert.  “Since when do leaves come draggin in here on my shoe?”

Sit up.  Kick off the sheet, fumble the flashlight off the windowsill and there at the end of the dim double-A beam is the biggest creature I have ever seen that has more than 4 legs.  A spider.  A hairy spider.  Trailing a line of spider fluid from a crack between the far wall and the floor.

Is that spider gonna crawl into my bed?  I doubt it.  I click off the light.  Sleep doesn’t exactly come.

I shine the light on it again, toss a pen across the floor and the spider does not flinch as it skitters past.  It’s dead.

I pad over and get my camera, take the spider’s picture—pretty fast because I don’t really like being barefoot on the same floor with that thing, even though it’s dead.

Back in the dark, the screen in my mind shows the spider image in the camera frame and it’s just a picture of a hairy spider, any old hairy spider, any size hairy spider, because there was nothing else in the frame for scale.  I get up, fetch the pen I threw across the floor and lay it down next to the spider which was about the same length and still did not move.  I snap another picture and climb back in bed.

It had to be dead.  What if it was doing that spider thing where they go motionless when they are scared?  And after an hour or so it will wake up and wander across my collarbone.

I click on the flashlight and look at the spider one more time.  It’s not showing any sign of breathing or a pulse, but is that something spiders do?  The poor thing probably escaped from a cat or a dog outside and dragged itself through the crack under the wall and got this far.  If it’s not dead yet, wouldn’t it be more polite to leave it to let go of its life in peace?

I consider that for a moment, then get the straw broom from the corner, sweep it out the door and into a shadow.

One of the reliable miracles of Planet Nancy is the way the housekeeping situation slips out of control in about the amount of time it takes to fall off a bicycle.

In the Church of Clean-and-Neat, where I once held High Priestess rank, the sinner who is despised along with the sin is the Messy Person, lacking in the civilized graces, a member of the failed social classes, too lazy to take the simple steps to….”  I don’t think that describes me.  Sometimes I get behind on a few things—the floors, the walls, the ceiling, the shelves, the countertops, the drawers, and true, sometimes a lapse might be for a decade or two, but clear surfaces and harmonious planes of color give me too much pleasure for me to qualify as a Messy Person.  What I lack is the right set of compuIsive habits that will keep my surroundings tidy without my having to try.

I do have housekeeping habits.  Objects whose misplacement would disrupt the household—my glasses, the dog water–always get set down in the same spot.  For the random rest of everything else, I set the things I’m finished with in the nearest place where they are unlikely to come to harm—and forget about them.  That’s why there’s a tin snips next to the breadboard, a plate on my desk, and knitting needles in my hair.  Locating any particular one of these objects simply requires a visual scan of all the favorite surfaces in case I see it, simultaneous with a mental scan for a picture of myself using it, finishing with it and putting it….voila!  Habits like these really do work for swimming upstream in a river of stuff, but they do very little to bring about tidiness in the surroundings

Don’t think me unchatechized in the habits of the Clean-and-Neat:  touch each piece of paper exactly once, make cleanup a part of every meal, put away your toys before bed. The only habit of neat people I habitually have is the one of turning grumpy when the environment silts up with clutter. Against grumpiness, one must invoke Rules.  No habit about it.

When the Grand Inquisitor of Clean-and-Neat sits in your ear hissing descriptions of your sins—lazy…dismal…simplest task… the Rules say you must freeze, set the timer, and give this issue 20 minutes of your life.  You’ll be amazed by how much you can clean up in 20 minutes, but since there’s so much more to go, you must also invoke the Rule of Four:  Each time you take something out, you must first put four things away.  You want a better pen?  peanut butter on your toast? clean underwear?  Pony up.  In a few days, the tide turns and look at you—pacing around, looking for a fourth thing to put away so you can take a screwdriver out of the toolbox and probably not grumpy anymore.

Good cheer breeds possibility.  Clean spaces beckon projects to every surface, and, well, time flies.

Last fall I washed all the windows.  Talk about a gift that keeps on giving.  A crisp day with the ladder.  And the next day, saying, “Trust me, you’re really going to appreciate this,” and going back to get every last streak  You should see The View from Planet Nancy.