Human Natures, Lava Falls

 

Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times,                27 August, 2020, Wyndy Knox Carr.

It’s not only ironic, but actually painful to me, and I’m sure, to Lucy Jane Bledsoe and others; that the Alaskan Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and all its rights are, as of August 18^th, opened up, like the last apple on Earth, for mostly foreign corporations to suck dry, pollute and then spit out.

Lava Falls, “at the intersection of wilderness, family, and survival,” speaks a voice of inscrutable Wilderness Herself, a living,  animated deity to we who find Her/Him/Them/It placed in green things, blossoms, food, bodies, compost, rocks, soil; as well as the very “unpredictable” wind and waters of our communities and life directions.

Even, maybe especially, in common things like “eucalyptus,…with an underbrush of blackberry.” Maybe even in our terrifyingly gorgeous but "unnatural" ruby-orange, smoke-filled wildfire-sunset skies.

Bledsoe lives in Berkeley, “loves teaching workshops, cooking, traveling anywhere, basketball, doing anything outside, and telling stories;” and, almost as an aside, has “traveled to Antarctica three times.” 

A keen, detached but not overly scientific observer of the world around her, Bledsoe spans publications from Arts & Letters: The Chronicle of Higher Education to ZYZZYVA, “defined by its risk-taking and egalitarianism;” as well as doing readings at our own Mrs. Dalloway’s and Books Inc. bookstores.

Her characters are so deftly created, I thought they were all her at one time or another in her life (they are mostly women) until I checked out her bio and read the fine print: “based on experience and research, (but) names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of …imagination or are used fictitiously.” An imagination deeply informed by wisdom about human nature.

Good, bad and mostly, naturally and unnaturally, in motion in-between. Kind of like rocks thrown about in “that blissful intersection between safety and danger…attaining the skills needed to occupy that slim territory of ecstasy.” Or NOT, tumbling down “a wide dry gully, littered with red gravel and black cinders.”

And relationships. Even in the novella, Lava Falls, Bledsoe weaves in and out of her characters’ bodies, thoughts, sensations, perceptions and feelings like an astral projection; making them bump, hug, gesture, pierce and bluster against and with each other with unnerving verisimilitude.

Throughout the book, I watched her slipping from first person to omniscient narrator like a sylph, thinking “how does she know all that?” and the wonder of them, and the stories, is I never really knew what they were going to do, what river of “human desperation for resources,” “Grief Tree” or “beautiful. And maddening” actions, feelings or fantasies they were going to sluice down or chop into next.

April/May of this year, local writer/editor and filmmakers Jessica Abbe and Toby McLeod screened Bullfrog Communities’ Standing on Sacred Ground online; and August 14^th, UUCB Personal Theology series hosted Dr. Paloma Pavel and Carl Anthony, co founders of Breakthrough Communities, as well as Marylia Kelley TriValley CAREs August 9th speaking on nuclear safety in our communities, nation and world for the 75th anniversary of the Atomic Bomb drop on Nagasaki, Japan.

These were all POWERFUL, poignant, determined and respectful examples of locals working deeply, intelligently, realistically and empathetically at the crossroads of political, cultural, land and environmental issues for peace, health and safety, like Lucy Jane Bledsoe does with her fiction in Lava Falls.

They make us contemplate “There is No Planet B,” how our daily practices relate to “The We of Me,” and, as Mary Oliver does, ask us,

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?”