The nesting sun is silent as still water
in after-rain peace; the clouds about her
take the same blaze on their wan terminations.
The chain of spire trees, darksome below,
are like the naked edge of the world.
Even the birds drop their chant to listen -
listen to the large witness of the world,
that its words are with evening reimbursed
in the after-rain peace - and then harrow
out their song again; same song, newly,
while more winnowed clouds gather like shot sheets
over the fire of the world that faced us.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Garden Sprawl Friday - on a Sunday
The first day of spring, or the day after, is a good time to have a new GSF post. My small experiment with overwintering carrots, cabbage, onions and rutabagas has been, well, an experiment. Which is to say, I'm learning and observing.
I started them off at a good stage in late summer, perhaps being a bit too young going into winter, and many have pulled through, though only to get obliterated by insects or the now on-coming slugs, looking to feed; and with the record warm winter we had, there is probably a lot of them.
I have been especially impressed with the carrots (Royal Chantenay). Their tops died off of course, but now their tops are sprouting again, and their roots are immaculate; it's just how to deal with slugs. They eat the tops, and then they do their best to feed into the root from the top down. They don't go far, but it's enough to kill the carrot.
There are no onions left. I don't know if that's because all of them got harvested through fall or not or what. The cabbages do great through winter, especially this variety, January King:
I've pictured the two most photogenic. The others are smaller and fighting back after being munched down. Again, insects or slugs. The leaves I put into the beds for winter are housing them, providing shelter and warmth.
The garlic is making its way:
And I cleaned out the greenhouse (not heated)
and seeded lots of varieties of lettuce (the seed I saved from the Cos lettuce last year was the first to come up), leeks, onions, cabbages, endive and raddichio, to be transplanted in April some time. I sowed March 1 and 2. In that time we've had frosts, highs of fifteen (celsius) and lows of 0, or just below (celsius). Of course, the temperature is higher in the greenhouse.
I started them off at a good stage in late summer, perhaps being a bit too young going into winter, and many have pulled through, though only to get obliterated by insects or the now on-coming slugs, looking to feed; and with the record warm winter we had, there is probably a lot of them.
I have been especially impressed with the carrots (Royal Chantenay). Their tops died off of course, but now their tops are sprouting again, and their roots are immaculate; it's just how to deal with slugs. They eat the tops, and then they do their best to feed into the root from the top down. They don't go far, but it's enough to kill the carrot.
There are no onions left. I don't know if that's because all of them got harvested through fall or not or what. The cabbages do great through winter, especially this variety, January King:
I've pictured the two most photogenic. The others are smaller and fighting back after being munched down. Again, insects or slugs. The leaves I put into the beds for winter are housing them, providing shelter and warmth.
The garlic is making its way:
And I cleaned out the greenhouse (not heated)
and seeded lots of varieties of lettuce (the seed I saved from the Cos lettuce last year was the first to come up), leeks, onions, cabbages, endive and raddichio, to be transplanted in April some time. I sowed March 1 and 2. In that time we've had frosts, highs of fifteen (celsius) and lows of 0, or just below (celsius). Of course, the temperature is higher in the greenhouse.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
In paradise...someone wish to translate?
Those distant objects starting at 8:25 (like the bus) are mirages by the way; people and things moving who knows where, many miles away, and their images literally transported on or near the horizon.
The houses watch each other
Driving Through Sawmill Towns
By Les Murray
1
In the high cool country,
having come from the clouds,
down a tilting road
into a distant valley,
you drive without haste. Your windscreen parts the forest,
swaying and glancing, and jammed midday brilliance
crouches in clearings ...
then you come across them,
the sawmill towns, bare hamlets built of boards
with perhaps a store,
perhaps a bridge beyond
and a little sidelong creek alive with pebbles.
2
The mills are roofed with iron, have no walls:
you look straight in as you pass, see lithe men working,
the swerve of a winch,
dim dazzling blades advancing
through a trolley-borne trunk
till it sags apart
in a manifold sprawl of weatherboards and battens.
The men watch you pass:
when you stop your car and ask them for directions,
tall youths look away—
it is the older men who
come out in blue singlets and talk softly to you.
Beside each mill, smoke trickles out of mounds
of ash and sawdust.
3
You glide on through town,
your mudguards damp with cloud.
The houses there wear verandahs out of shyness,
all day in calendared kitchens, women listen
for cars on the road,
lost children in the bush,
a cry from the mill, a footstep—
nothing happens.
The half-heard radio sings
its song of sidewalks.
Sometimes a woman, sweeping her front step,
or a plain young wife at a tankstand fetching water
in a metal bucket will turn round and gaze
at the mountains in wonderment,
looking for a city.
4
Evenings are very quiet. All around
the forest is there.
As night comes down, the houses watch each other:
a light going out in a window here has meaning.
You speed away through the upland,
glare through towns
and are gone in the forest, glowing on far hills.
On summer nights
ground-crickets sing and pause.
In the dark of winter, tin roofs sough with rain,
downpipes chafe in the wind, agog with water.
Men sit after tea
by the stove while their wives talk, rolling a dead match
between their fingers,
thinking of the future.
-----
From Learning Human
By Les Murray
1
In the high cool country,
having come from the clouds,
down a tilting road
into a distant valley,
you drive without haste. Your windscreen parts the forest,
swaying and glancing, and jammed midday brilliance
crouches in clearings ...
then you come across them,
the sawmill towns, bare hamlets built of boards
with perhaps a store,
perhaps a bridge beyond
and a little sidelong creek alive with pebbles.
2
The mills are roofed with iron, have no walls:
you look straight in as you pass, see lithe men working,
the swerve of a winch,
dim dazzling blades advancing
through a trolley-borne trunk
till it sags apart
in a manifold sprawl of weatherboards and battens.
The men watch you pass:
when you stop your car and ask them for directions,
tall youths look away—
it is the older men who
come out in blue singlets and talk softly to you.
Beside each mill, smoke trickles out of mounds
of ash and sawdust.
3
You glide on through town,
your mudguards damp with cloud.
The houses there wear verandahs out of shyness,
all day in calendared kitchens, women listen
for cars on the road,
lost children in the bush,
a cry from the mill, a footstep—
nothing happens.
The half-heard radio sings
its song of sidewalks.
Sometimes a woman, sweeping her front step,
or a plain young wife at a tankstand fetching water
in a metal bucket will turn round and gaze
at the mountains in wonderment,
looking for a city.
4
Evenings are very quiet. All around
the forest is there.
As night comes down, the houses watch each other:
a light going out in a window here has meaning.
You speed away through the upland,
glare through towns
and are gone in the forest, glowing on far hills.
On summer nights
ground-crickets sing and pause.
In the dark of winter, tin roofs sough with rain,
downpipes chafe in the wind, agog with water.
Men sit after tea
by the stove while their wives talk, rolling a dead match
between their fingers,
thinking of the future.
-----
From Learning Human
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Be Newly Taxed and Be Newly Consuming: Problem Fixed!
If he were alive today, Jim Varney could possibly, possibly single-handedly "resuscitate" the economy through consumerism (for a little while at least) but since he's dead (God rest his soul) that option is totally out - know what I mean?
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Journey on the Fish
Journey on the Fish - By Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann really did "just want to paint beautiful paintings", but in that setting forth he could not bypass a whole lot of other sub-mysteries along the way; or what he - with that economical Teutonic thrust of his which he never lost - delightfully called, "certain last things."
Those "certain last things" cannot be spoken about with words (at least not in the way that painting demands; poetry is another matter). They cannot be explained. They refute and refuse explanation. And it's there where painting begins.
And later, the viewer comes along and sees the "afterward" of where the painting began. The viewer meets it with whatever means he has within himself.
This continually built communication (and no, it is not some "collective unconscious" or "collective consciousness") is part of what's so vital about culture. It moves and builds from generation to generation as silently as trees grow, or planets move. Or it is supposed to.
It is an objective freedom. Its removal from our lives is utter death for us.
The modern, or post-modern or whatever critic, looks at the above painting and thinks that Beckmann is presenting some puzzle or allegory. He thinks Beckmann is being too figurative, too obvious, and too coded. His critics criticize him for actually seeming to say something (oh no!) and then in the same breath criticize him for not saying enough.
Beckmann (who hated talking about his paintings) once responded to a reporter asking why he put fish into so many of his paintings:
"Because I like fish, both to eat and to look at. Also they are symbols." What do they symbolize? "Geist — spirit," Beckmann replied. "But the man who looks at my pictures must figure them out for himself."
It is interesting to note that the first thing Beckmann said as to why he brought many fish into his work is that he simply likes them - to eat and to look at.
That is a good response. We do, after all, eat fish. Why do we eat? To live; to have strength; to have potency. But these are "certain last things". As Chesterton implies through a character in The Napolean of Notting Hill:
"A man strikes the lyre, and says, 'Life is real, life is earnest,' and then goes into a room and stuffs alien substances into a hole in his head."
There is an endless diffusion of details to be had in this world of certain last things. And not one thing is without an individual name that shows forth in some manner the infinite expansion of God's creation.
The man and the woman are made one flesh in marriage: on open space (to be gleaned by the sea and boat) two fishes fill the plane, and on the fish two people, careening to earth - or are they circumnavigating the roundess of the sphere, and thus going up? The man cannot look and maybe fears his own potency while the woman looks ahead steadily. They compliment each other. And in their hands, like a last meagre little flourish, we see a mask. But they are each other's masks.
They are holding each other's mask.
Certain last things.
-----
Those "certain last things" cannot be spoken about with words (at least not in the way that painting demands; poetry is another matter). They cannot be explained. They refute and refuse explanation. And it's there where painting begins.
And later, the viewer comes along and sees the "afterward" of where the painting began. The viewer meets it with whatever means he has within himself.
This continually built communication (and no, it is not some "collective unconscious" or "collective consciousness") is part of what's so vital about culture. It moves and builds from generation to generation as silently as trees grow, or planets move. Or it is supposed to.
It is an objective freedom. Its removal from our lives is utter death for us.
The modern, or post-modern or whatever critic, looks at the above painting and thinks that Beckmann is presenting some puzzle or allegory. He thinks Beckmann is being too figurative, too obvious, and too coded. His critics criticize him for actually seeming to say something (oh no!) and then in the same breath criticize him for not saying enough.
Beckmann (who hated talking about his paintings) once responded to a reporter asking why he put fish into so many of his paintings:
"Because I like fish, both to eat and to look at. Also they are symbols." What do they symbolize? "Geist — spirit," Beckmann replied. "But the man who looks at my pictures must figure them out for himself."
It is interesting to note that the first thing Beckmann said as to why he brought many fish into his work is that he simply likes them - to eat and to look at.
That is a good response. We do, after all, eat fish. Why do we eat? To live; to have strength; to have potency. But these are "certain last things". As Chesterton implies through a character in The Napolean of Notting Hill:
"A man strikes the lyre, and says, 'Life is real, life is earnest,' and then goes into a room and stuffs alien substances into a hole in his head."
There is an endless diffusion of details to be had in this world of certain last things. And not one thing is without an individual name that shows forth in some manner the infinite expansion of God's creation.
The man and the woman are made one flesh in marriage: on open space (to be gleaned by the sea and boat) two fishes fill the plane, and on the fish two people, careening to earth - or are they circumnavigating the roundess of the sphere, and thus going up? The man cannot look and maybe fears his own potency while the woman looks ahead steadily. They compliment each other. And in their hands, like a last meagre little flourish, we see a mask. But they are each other's masks.
They are holding each other's mask.
Certain last things.
-----
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
The Salvage Yard
Enbrethiliel's continued reviews of The Babysitters Club books has me all nostalgic. No, no, I never read The Babysitters Club, though there were plenty of copies lying around the house belonging to sisters. Though that in itself would be a fond enough memory.
No, just that it brings to mind my immersion in the "Alfred Hitchcock" Three Investigators books! Oh, dear Lord, those years beginning with grade five: The Secret of The Crooked Cat:
I actually picked this book to do a book report on (remember those?) and can still remember the point at which it was no longer a school task, scarily, not even remotely, but discovered that I could actually follow a story - on my own - and that I actually enjoyed it, way too much, as I started reading all the other Three Investigators books.
Those summer nights in bed, reading, but there in their secret headquarters hidden in the salvage yard in southern California with its secret entrances...Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, Bob Andrews...
Not much else to say there. And then Father Brown came along, later...
Image source: http://threeinvestigatorsbooks.homestead.com/Crookedcat.html
No, just that it brings to mind my immersion in the "Alfred Hitchcock" Three Investigators books! Oh, dear Lord, those years beginning with grade five: The Secret of The Crooked Cat:
I actually picked this book to do a book report on (remember those?) and can still remember the point at which it was no longer a school task, scarily, not even remotely, but discovered that I could actually follow a story - on my own - and that I actually enjoyed it, way too much, as I started reading all the other Three Investigators books.
Those summer nights in bed, reading, but there in their secret headquarters hidden in the salvage yard in southern California with its secret entrances...Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, Bob Andrews...
Not much else to say there. And then Father Brown came along, later...
Image source: http://threeinvestigatorsbooks.homestead.com/Crookedcat.html
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
For your Lenten Observation
"Great things end; small things endure.
We must go back to where we were, to the point where you took the wrong turn. We must go back to the main foundations of life - without dirtying the water." --Domenico, the Madman
We must go back to where we were, to the point where you took the wrong turn. We must go back to the main foundations of life - without dirtying the water." --Domenico, the Madman
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