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piano is Head of a Flamingo, by Mark Catesby. It was drawn circa 1740. Catesby did not, as Audubon did, only replicate what he saw in “the natural world.” Catesby combined disparate elements into mesmerizing tableaux. He floated the flamingo’s head, for example, in front of a branch of coral which normally be found underwater. In his bird drawings, Catesby offers an “ornithological expression,” rather than merely an “ornithological experience.” A very dear friend prefers to sit facing away from Head of a Flamingo, because, she says, “I invariably dream about it.” I have two heroes: Mark Catesby and the Japanese writer Ryonosuke Akutagawa, who wrote Hell Screen and Rashamon, among other works. “What good is intelligence,” Akutagawa asked, “if you can’t discover a useful melancholy?” I often see Catesby’s entire Natural History oeuvre as being underlit by a kind of melancholy, in that even bird art can be autobiographical in tone. Catesby, painter of birds, fish and flowers, never left a self-portrait. Testimony as to his demeanor is scarce. However, his friend, Emanuel Mendez de Costa, left a verbal sketch of Catesby: “… tall, meagre, hard favoured, and with a sullen look—extremely grave or sedate, and of a silent disposition; but when he contracted a friendship was communicative and affable.” Catesby was also severely nearsighted.
    Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Mason & Dixon, deals head-on with the haunting levels of loneliness born of long years in the early American wilderness. One of the powerful aspects of this inimitable work, is that Pynchon engenders an empathetic loneliness of uncanny dimensions in readers—in me, at least. Of epic loneliness, historian D.L. LaPorte writes: “Mountain men are good examples, but there are other examples of commensurate import—long-time wilderness experience is what draws in eccentrics, and also creates eccentrics of a more extreme sort.” I think that DM might agree that Jaime deAngulo would be one of those. Rogue ethnographer/linguist/poet, deAngulo lived in Northern California in the first half of the twentieth century. He spoke at least a dozen California Indian languages and all but invented anecdotal linguistics, that is, autobiographical linguistics. DM and I have exchanged books by deAngulo, and while I’ve never asked him outright what he thinks, I know he admires the writing, which is really all I need to know. On crows, deAngulo now and then offers a disquisition: “… well, first of all, they walk on two feet. You could see that as a mockery of humans. Also, crows could be considered the first linguists, at least in Northern California cosmology—they spoke every human and animal tongue, plus crow-talk, naturally, and they equally mocked all inarticulate gesture, whether in humans or animals, or themselves. I one said to Jung that crows were self-reflective. He didn’t even feign the slightest interest.” DM has a lovely pond out back on his property. Standing next to it after swimming in it one afternoon, I mentioned to DM that a neighbor was about to hire someone to shoot a great blue heron who, most every day that summer, arrived to her pond to eat frogs and fingerling trout. “It’s eating all the fish,” that neighbor said. I said that in my view her pond had been anointed. “She should provide for the Gods,” said DM.
    On the wall opposite a quilt that my wife made, is the Inuit print, Laughing Gull. The title is a literal interpretation of the action: the gull is indeed laughing. However, flying out of the gull’s throat is a naked Inuit man, followed by items of clothing, such as mukluks, mittens, parka, and assorted spears, knives (ulus), dog sled reins, other implements of quotidian life in the arctic. Laughing Gull is composed in the simple, almost hieroglyphic manner of the earliest Inuit drawings allowed for public and commercial presentation, which would be roughly from the late 1940s or very early 1950s. In the