WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.540 align:middle line:90% 00:00:00.540 --> 00:00:02.610 align:middle line:90% And one more. 00:00:02.610 --> 00:00:04.800 align:middle line:84% And more San Diego poem, and then I'm 00:00:04.800 --> 00:00:06.990 align:middle line:84% going to close with the Montana poem. 00:00:06.990 --> 00:00:11.540 align:middle line:84% I guess you'd call this the hermit meets hyper reality. 00:00:11.540 --> 00:00:18.450 align:middle line:84% It starts with a bird in Montana and ends up 00:00:18.450 --> 00:00:21.990 align:middle line:84% in San Diego with something that I usually don't do. 00:00:21.990 --> 00:00:25.690 align:middle line:84% It has lots of literary allusions, lots of statistics, 00:00:25.690 --> 00:00:26.850 align:middle line:90% and so forth. 00:00:26.850 --> 00:00:29.490 align:middle line:84% Emily Dickinson, I'll give you the clues. 00:00:29.490 --> 00:00:32.490 align:middle line:84% Emily Dickinson is in here, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 00:00:32.490 --> 00:00:34.110 align:middle line:90% and Alexander Pope. 00:00:34.110 --> 00:00:37.280 align:middle line:90% 00:00:37.280 --> 00:00:42.330 align:middle line:84% "The Intricacy of the Song Inverse to the Dull Lores." 00:00:42.330 --> 00:00:44.310 align:middle line:84% "We learned the song of Swainson's thrush 00:00:44.310 --> 00:00:46.530 align:middle line:84% as we sat on the deck talking of science 00:00:46.530 --> 00:00:48.420 align:middle line:90% under a comet littered sky. 00:00:48.420 --> 00:00:51.795 align:middle line:84% One rude note circled us and then the flute. 00:00:51.795 --> 00:00:54.690 align:middle line:84% If only we lived a little higher, 00:00:54.690 --> 00:00:57.370 align:middle line:84% deeper in the boreal forest, said the ornithologist, 00:00:57.370 --> 00:01:00.990 align:middle line:90% we might hear the hermit. 00:01:00.990 --> 00:01:04.620 align:middle line:84% Nightingale ascending Dvorak's symphony From the New World. 00:01:04.620 --> 00:01:07.890 align:middle line:84% Rufous tailed piano, swamp piccolo. 00:01:07.890 --> 00:01:13.590 align:middle line:84% Why always a fascination with what is higher, disinclined? 00:01:13.590 --> 00:01:16.620 align:middle line:84% Everyone loves a hermit, be it human or bird, 00:01:16.620 --> 00:01:18.300 align:middle line:90% spare room a narrow perch. 00:01:18.300 --> 00:01:21.330 align:middle line:84% Behind a cedar hedge inside a yellow picket fence, 00:01:21.330 --> 00:01:24.330 align:middle line:84% children cluttered as a poet, like Rapunzel 00:01:24.330 --> 00:01:29.310 align:middle line:84% from her second story window, bobbed sweet bait on a string. 00:01:29.310 --> 00:01:32.190 align:middle line:84% She would not come down to them, nor would 00:01:32.190 --> 00:01:35.430 align:middle line:84% the utopist under his eaves drinking clarett, 00:01:35.430 --> 00:01:40.650 align:middle line:84% taking notes on the grace of pigs, the glaucous seaweed. 00:01:40.650 --> 00:01:44.850 align:middle line:84% Yet even bees drown in their own honey. 00:01:44.850 --> 00:01:47.280 align:middle line:84% And no one attends the recluse every day. 00:01:47.280 --> 00:01:51.030 align:middle line:84% No one likes the taciturn one, the inadequate personality. 00:01:51.030 --> 00:01:54.240 align:middle line:84% Vita voluntaria, a life of no fixed rules, 00:01:54.240 --> 00:01:58.980 align:middle line:84% cautioned the Saints, leads to degeneration. 00:01:58.980 --> 00:02:01.500 align:middle line:84% Last February a neighbor called The Hunch, 00:02:01.500 --> 00:02:05.520 align:middle line:84% for her misshapen body, strung herself from the cabin rafters. 00:02:05.520 --> 00:02:07.620 align:middle line:84% She'd been the village crone, the dried 00:02:07.620 --> 00:02:10.830 align:middle line:84% rose in the steamer trunk long enough. 00:02:10.830 --> 00:02:15.120 align:middle line:84% The way that Alexander Pope dug a melancholy and brooding hole, 00:02:15.120 --> 00:02:17.970 align:middle line:84% studded it with Cornish diamonds, coral branches, 00:02:17.970 --> 00:02:22.050 align:middle line:84% burnished flint till he turned the dirt subaqueous, 00:02:22.050 --> 00:02:26.580 align:middle line:84% so the world would look different when he arose. 00:02:26.580 --> 00:02:32.160 align:middle line:84% So I too draw the drapes, away from humans. 00:02:32.160 --> 00:02:35.670 align:middle line:84% Bottlenose dolphins spend 87% of their time 00:02:35.670 --> 00:02:38.160 align:middle line:84% at the far end of the pool, and still they 00:02:38.160 --> 00:02:42.540 align:middle line:84% get ulcers in the zoo, balancing all day like ballerinas 00:02:42.540 --> 00:02:44.510 align:middle line:90% taking first position. 00:02:44.510 --> 00:02:49.560 align:middle line:84% 5.8 acres per human and no species would go extinct. 00:02:49.560 --> 00:02:52.320 align:middle line:84% Scientists say our brains grow larger, not wiser, 00:02:52.320 --> 00:02:54.270 align:middle line:90% from processing information. 00:02:54.270 --> 00:02:59.880 align:middle line:84% 25 birds in formation fly 70% further than one alone. 00:02:59.880 --> 00:03:04.210 align:middle line:84% If I were a bird, I'd be the hermit thrush. 00:03:04.210 --> 00:03:07.510 align:middle line:84% Brown and brown again, like an old rag rug, 00:03:07.510 --> 00:03:09.730 align:middle line:84% he will not sing on the wintering ground. 00:03:09.730 --> 00:03:12.010 align:middle line:84% He will not sing during migration. 00:03:12.010 --> 00:03:15.190 align:middle line:84% He knows 5,000 versions of the same song. 00:03:15.190 --> 00:03:19.330 align:middle line:84% He'll only sing alone near dusk when there's no competition. 00:03:19.330 --> 00:03:22.300 align:middle line:84% Once I rubbed my body with mother's vanishing cream 00:03:22.300 --> 00:03:25.150 align:middle line:84% till I reeked and slid with hiding. 00:03:25.150 --> 00:03:28.680 align:middle line:84% But you have to be obvious to make a living. 00:03:28.680 --> 00:03:31.060 align:middle line:84% Mockingbirds learned to grind their gears 00:03:31.060 --> 00:03:35.230 align:middle line:84% to mimic the cry of the freeway, and even the whisper 00:03:35.230 --> 00:03:40.900 align:middle line:84% of a stranger as it floats toward an unborn human ear 00:03:40.900 --> 00:03:46.150 align:middle line:84% will register 20 decibels in the womb." 00:03:46.150 --> 00:03:47.980 align:middle line:90% True. 00:03:47.980 --> 00:03:49.030 align:middle line:90% But isn't it strange. 00:03:49.030 --> 00:03:49.930 align:middle line:90% How do they know? 00:03:49.930 --> 00:03:57.190 align:middle line:84% It's-- the way they know is a cellist was pregnant-- 00:03:57.190 --> 00:04:00.230 align:middle line:90% to tell you the story. 00:04:00.230 --> 00:04:08.320 align:middle line:84% And her group was practicing under a bridge, 00:04:08.320 --> 00:04:11.320 align:middle line:84% and the baby started to kick up, and would just 00:04:11.320 --> 00:04:14.470 align:middle line:84% have a fit every time she would practice 00:04:14.470 --> 00:04:17.709 align:middle line:84% her cello under the bridge, and so they did a decibel reading 00:04:17.709 --> 00:04:21.490 align:middle line:84% and discovered that it so magnified the sound 00:04:21.490 --> 00:04:23.740 align:middle line:84% and drove it back into her body that the kid was just 00:04:23.740 --> 00:04:27.400 align:middle line:90% going nuts over this. 00:04:27.400 --> 00:04:30.280 align:middle line:84% And I mean, this is the way that I came to feel in San Diego, 00:04:30.280 --> 00:04:33.880 align:middle line:84% that the air itself was saying occupied, occupied. 00:04:33.880 --> 00:04:36.030 align:middle line:90% Don't take a breath.