Today I'm sitting down with my data, again, turning it over and trying to make it into a cohesive figure. I've jotted notes, somewhat haphazardly, in a series of notebooks. 'What are the values at play?' one says. 'If we assume every researcher is imposing a narrative on her subject--what is my narrative?'

There was an article in the New York Times this weekend about academic fraud, about a researcher who completely fabricated data sets for multiple studies. My data is real, but there's something about turning information into results, imposing a narrative, that makes it easy to see how someone could go one step further and just build the narrative from scratch. This fall I had to present my research as part of my degree requirement, despite the fact that my data collection was still in progress and my results were nebulous at best. So instead I presented information about my proposal and quotes from individuals I had interviewed, coupled with a quote from 'Wisconsin Death Trip' that had nothing to do with my research at all. The quote, from Michael Lesy, runs thus:

"This book is an exercise in historical actuality, but it has only as much to do with history as the heat and spectrum of light that makes it visible, or the retina and optical nerve of your eye. It is as much an exercise of history as it is an experiment of alchemy. Its primary intention is to make you experience the pages now before you as a flexible mirror that if turned one way can reflect the odor of the air that surrounded me as I wrote this; if turned another, can project your anticipations of next Monday; if turned again, can transmit the sound of breathing in the deep winter air of a room eighty years ago, and if turned once again, this time backwards on itself, can fuse all three images, and so can focus who I once was, what you might yet be, and what may have happened, all upon a single point of your imagination, and transform them like light focused by a lens on paper, from a lower form of energy to a higher."

I am writing a thesis. It is probably going to be at least a little drier than I would like it to be, and the narrative atop it, in the interest of honesty, will probably not be much of a narrative at all; more of an outline than anything fully fleshed. But there's something beneath all of that, outside the tidy box of science, and that's my experience of writing this thesis, conducting this research. Sometimes I get tired just thinking about it, and the whole thing feels like my pound of flesh, and sometimes I...don't, and it doesn't. Instead it feels like something I know how to do, something I've known how to do. It feels like a story I've been given the chance to pull from the ore.

I'm sitting in my office now. It's the second office that has hosted me during this process. To my left is a drained mug of hot chocolate. To my right is a pen, a spoon, my wrist brace, and a pile of cards with a snapped rubber band atop them. Printed on each card is a statement about chronic wasting disease. These cards are one of my research instruments.

Because my research is mostly qualitative, as opposed to quantitative, my other research instrument is myself. My data is being pulled through the cheesecloth of my mind, and as a result, my results, if turned one way, will almost certainly reflect things that only I can see: to me they will reflect summer in Manitoba, sitting on the grass outside the Riding Mountain visitors' center and trying to round up participants; fall in Saskatchewan, when Prince Albert turned gold; driving through both provinces on dark winter nights with snow blowing across those straight, steady roads. And here, in Tromsø, miles away from those places, trying to figure out what the story is I'm telling.

There have been so many times in my life when I've stared at my own history like a scrying glass, trying to figure out what story it tells, trying to project the past onto the future. Even if my narratives feel like an imposition, what I'm doing with my data is not so different from what I've done forever; what everyone does, I think, as we try to make sense of our surroundings. Diederik Stapel, the aforementioned academic fraud, was unable to let the incongruities that emerged during that process stand. His story says a lot of interesting--and I think true--things about academic culture, but when I look at the incongruities in my research I can't help but wonder if they're the most important part, because they challenge us. They challenge me to lay aside the things I had expected to be true and confront the things that are.

A while back, I wrote about research and cameras and objectivity. And some other stuff--I tend to write discursively, always, but especially here. As I sit here, my own flawed research instrument with my own flawed data set, I feel comfortable forsaking objectivity, because I think, if I am translucent enough in my narrative building, it will emerge anyway. There's a quote I keep pinned above my desk, from Richard Hugo's book "The Triggering Town": "I doubt that academic writing will improve until academics believe Valéry, who said he couldn't think of anything worse than being right." In Hugo's book, which is about poetry, it's barely an aside, but above my workspace it's a reminder: I am neither objective nor right. I can try to tell the truth as far as I can see it, but when I encounter something that is murky and opaque to me, the stone that worries my shoe--that's okay. The story the data tells belongs to my research participants, not to me. But, more importantly, nearly every story we draw from reality is dogged with inconsistencies. The process of storytelling is sanding them down, varnishing them to a high gloss, but not eliminating them. And that's a good thing, because it's the grain in the wood that shows us it's real, it came from a true thing. When the grain repeats itself, when it becomes unnaturally regular, when we knock on it and it echoes strange, we can tell the fraud for what it is.

Hungry

Bears cougars rattlesnakes man alive
people keep saying aren’t you
afraid living way out there no
close neighbors real friends
where do you shop on the spur
just go for a cuppa coffee look
what if you suffer an attack of
anything can happen my god
at your age it’s crazy—

--------------------------Well
the other day I said whoa
stepping back to gaze in wonder
at how this sow pushed over
my compost box oh I understood
of course spring and all the surge
still I’d built that box myself
scraps of ancient planks squared off
clean and straight at the corners
nailed tight with spikes a big old
boy I was sorry to see lying there
behind the barn all messed apart
a long scar clawed across the black
sheet of plastic covering the top
or not covering anything now
except a patch of gray snow
bristling with pine and fir needles
how many moldy cheeses and pea
pods skins seeds and pots of coffee
grounds I’d given that box to mix
and cook and sweeten over the years!

------------------------------------------Oh
she was hungry all right bear-
hungry after a good long sleep
and quite likely eating for three
those two babies back in the den
blind whining and wanting
their milk yes sir friends
sour is sweet things break
the yearning returns home
and abroad hungry is hungry.

-Gary Gildner, 2013

It's Earth Day. I've nodded to Earth Day before in this blog, but most ways you slice it it's a weird holiday. Not really a holiday at all, actually. I was reading this breakdown of the American environmental movement, which also includes a brief history of Earth Day. The explanation there serves to demonstrate that Earth Day really isn't a holiday at all--it was initiated as a teach-in.

I don't have much to teach here. If you read the article, my views probably align with Aaron Sachs's, and, as Nicholas Lemann, the article's author, writes: "Sachs’s ruminative, associative style...isn’t well suited to forcing a main argument out into the open." I think Lemann might mean that Sachs isn't well suited to presenting a policy solution to our environmental problems. Here's something that shouldn't surprise you: neither am I. If I peel back my mixed feelings, the only thing I'll say with any certainty is that I think if you can convince people the environment is worth something, is important for itself, conservation, environmentalism, or whatever it is will come more easily.

For the past few days I've been in the mountains on a ski trip with a group from the university. It was nice to slip away from the things I should be doing (coughthesiscough), though on the bus ride back to the city they all came rushing back. And yet--today, the shadow of my pack is still on my shoulders (I'm sore, I'm saying that I'm sore), my computer in my lap, I still know that the woods and the mountains are there.

It's difficult to balance, though, because I come back to civilization and immediately flip open my laptop. I go to the grocery store and buy chocolate and orange juice (and some other stuff, because that's not a balanced diet). I don't stay in the woods or the mountains. The little backcountry huts that pepper Norway's mountains are cushier than what you'll find in much of the world's backcountry, but they still aren't wired for electricity, for internet, for amenities that have become expected. And we have the privilege to return to these things, and are comfortable in the knowledge that we're roughing it, but this isn't permanent. Would I be as comfortable with the mountains, as pleased to know them, if I was trying to carve my life from them, if I wasn't going to catch a bus back to town at the end of the weekend?

I don't know. I don't know if I want to plumb those depths--the ones about the environmental movement and class, about how we use the land, about the myths of wilderness--right now. I'm not sure I can end this cleanly or easily, myself, so I'll leave you with a quote from Aaron Sachs by way of Nicholas Lemann and be done with it:

My hope, for all future generations, is that they will have (in addition to sunshine, fresh air, clean water, and fertile soil) a somewhat slower pace of life, with plenty of time to pause, in quiet places... haunted places—everyday, accessible places, open to the public—places that are not too radically transformed over time—places susceptible of cultivation, where people can express their caring, and nature can respond—places with tough, gnarled roots and tangled stalks, with digging mammals and noisy birds—places of common remembrance and hopeful guidance—places of unexpected encounters—places that breed solidarity across difference—places where children can walk in the footsteps of those who have gone before—places that are perpetually up for adoption—places that have been humanized but not conquered or commodified—places that foster a kind of connectedness both mournful and celebratory.

When I Don't Know What Kind of Bird I Am

I’m surprised the mild wind that brought me here
could turn so quickly spooky. Kicked-up, horse-like.

Or, when standing still & I sense myself askew,
at a slight angle to the universe, confused

re: the who & what & how. How to openopenopen.
How to harvest flax without degrading the hills.

The violet and low-rolling hills.
It would help to have a basic understanding

of thermodynamics to better parse, for example,
the ins and outs of heat exchange. As in, it’s a cold day

in March, you put your hand in my pocket.
Put your fine, cold hand in my flannel-lined pocket.

It would help if you’d talk a little Brontë, a little Austen
to me while we stroll across the softening fields

to the lambing shed where we’ll kneel down
in our muddy boots and count the curly heads.

-Maya Smith Janson, 2013

On Having Misidentified a Wild Flower

A thrush, because I'd been wrong,
Burst rightly into song
In a world not vague, not lonely,
Not governed by me only.

-Richard Wilbur, 1988

Waste

Not even waste
is inviolate.
The day misspent,
the love misplaced,
has inside it
the seed of redemption.
Nothing is exempt
from resurrection.
It is tiresome
how the grass
re-ripens, greening
all along the punched
and mucked horizon
once the bison
have moved on,
leaning into hunger
and hard luck.

-Kay Ryan

I've been back in Tromsø for a week--long enough to have restocked my fridge not once but twice--but I had meant to write something about all the time I spent on trains and buses (and sometimes boats) while I was away. And then I try, and find there isn't much to say. I mean, you don't need me to tell you how to book a train ticket. It's no different from booking a ticket for anything else. And I bought all my bus tickets on the bus.

Here's something really obvious about bus and rail travel: you see a lot. I saw reindeer in the mountains. I saw people ice-fishing in fjords. I saw long stretches of Norway, basically. Sometimes I slept instead of seeing, because every landscape has the capacity to become ordinary.

Today I was reading some words from Robert Bly about Olav H. Hauge, whose poetry Bly translated from Norwegian into English. Hauge lived his entire life in Ulvik, which is somewhere I did not pass through on my travels. Still, I imagine I could have. This is what Bly has to say about Hauge's lifestyle: "If you have a tiny farm, you need to love poetry more than the farm. If you sell apples, you need to love poetry more than the apples. It's good to settle down somewhere and to love poetry more than that. Lewis Hyde, in his great book The Gift, discusses the nature of the old precommercial gift-giving society. The economy of scarcity, he says, is always associated with gift-giving. Olav H. Hauge lived in a gift-giving, pre-communal society all of his life. The richness in his small house lay in the handmade spoons and bowls, the wooden reading chair, and the bookcases to which the best poetry from many continents had found its way."

It's worth noting, maybe, that The Gift is one of my favorite books. But that's not the point I was trying to make by pulling this quote. I recognize something in Bly's description, something I spent two weeks staring out windows at. Sitting on the couch with my mother's cousin, she commented on how much I had moved around compared to her family. There's not much to say for it. It would be completely false to say people in Norway don't move and people in the U.S. do. No--it's just that there's something in the small towns here, the ones that are just a handful of houses between the ocean and a mountain, that feels hard-won.

There are towns like this in Saskatchewan, too. There are towns like this in the U.S. But Norway, to those of us who aren't from here, sometimes becomes a picture or a postcard, with everything directed to the picturesque and no thought given to what undergirds it. And sometimes the infrastructure is the most striking of all: this is a place, real and whole--no mere wilderness, no mere tourist destination. The richness, to borrow one of Bly's words, is what makes it worthwhile, is what keeps me from tearing my eyes from the window as the countryside slides past.

Sweetness, always

Why such harsh machinery?
Why, to write down the stuff
and people of every day,
must poems be dressed up in gold,
in old and fearful stone?

I want verses of felt or feather
which scarcely weigh, mild verses
with the intimacy of beds
where people have loved and dreamed.
I want poems stained
by hands and everydayness.

Verses of pastry which melt
into milk and sugar in the mouth,
air and water to drink,
the bites and kisses of love.
I long for eatable sonnets,
poems of honey and flour.

Vanity keeps prodding us
to lift ourselves skyward
or to make deep and useless
tunnels underground.
So we forget the joyous
love-needs of our bodies.
We forget about pastries.
We are not feeding the world.

-Pablo Neruda, 1973