The Contessa Explains

She only used them for climbing trees, and I dance.

I found her in the forest, and now she won't get off my leg.

I was not cut out for motherhood.

After all, we are all freaks, of one sort or the other.

Beneath our masks you'll discover we are not related.

She simply refused to practice her piano.

Frankly, I found her completely disarming.

In exchange, I designed her blouse, which fits her perfectly.

Readers, click on the picture for closer examination, and feel free to add your own interpretation. Your guess is quite as good as ours...

Mannequin

This is apropos of absolutely nothing that I can consciously identify, except that I find it mesmerizing. Lay models (or lay figures) are (most often) wooden jointed human body forms used as artist's models, as shown in a marvelously enviable collection in the top picture. Generally the lay figures are small, if not miniature models, making the featured lay model even more remarkable. The photographs above are of a fully life-size 19th century model which is so detailed she has wooden ball-and-socket joints, simulated muscle tissue, breasts, nipples, and even a "tummy" button (as heard on BBC). She is covered in flesh-colored silk; her hands' x-rays appear almost human. It is said she is able to move just like "you or I."

Let me hasten to note she was explicitly intended for artistic purposes only. Historically, this sort of body double served to spare the artist's human model the tedium (or embarrassment) of particular poses (which poses I will leave to your discreet imagination).

I cannot help but think there must have been something vaguely troubling about having one's "dummy" be lovelier than oneself, which might explain her obscurity heretofore. And how could the artist him or herself resist falling in love with her (giving added dimension to the concept of "lay" figure)? There is something so serene and detached in her expression, in her dignified, yet utterly relaxed, posture. Perhaps her truest love was... her creator?

Read more, were you so inclined, here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/08/04/nlay04.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/08/04/ixportal.html

From James Baldwin

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden,
I don't know;
But they have scarcely seen their garden
before they see the flaming sword.
Then perhaps, life only offers the choice
of remembering the garden or forgetting it.
Either or, it takes strength to remember,
it takes another kind of strength to forget, it
takes a hero to do both.

People who remember court madness through pain,
the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence.
People who forget court another kind of madness,
the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence.

And the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember,
and madmen who forget.

Heroes are rare.

"Autotomy"

In danger, the holothurian cuts itself in two.
It abandons one self to a hungry world
and with the other self it flees.

Wislawa Szymborska; View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems;
Harvest Books; 1995.

So there you have it. A holothurian (as I'm imagining everyone else but me knows) is a sea cucumber (although I rather like thinking of it as an alien from the planet Holothur) . Autotomy, a truly useful concept both psychologically and physiologically, is the casting off of a body part as a means of escape.

The above is merely the first verse of what is a profound Szymborska poem, available here in its entirety:

http://books.google.com/books?id=kA1uZhCyi5cC&pg=PA137&lpg=PA137&dq=Autotomy+Szymborska&source=web&ots=aeaZV4n4fc&sig=mvrzUcAl_NVvv-iQcEpZCXhyh6I&hl=en#PPA137,M1

"It took the form of the grandest old lady he had ever seen."

In a quest to find a good image for a holothurian (and isn't it remarkable to imagine it could be found on our very own planet?) I found instead a simply delightful tale from the 1800s, The Water Babies, by Charles Kingsley.

As it happens it is fraught with all sorts of (largely predictable) nineteenth-century biases, both good and problematic, but in the main is quite charming. A chimney-sweeper named Tom becomes a water-baby (never mind how for the moment) whose adventures are very much like our dear Alice's, only in his case his tribulations bring him at last to Mother Carey, formed from an iceberg: a white marble lady, sitting on a white marble throne. And from the foot of the throne there swum away, out and out into the sea, millions of new-born creatures, of more shapes and colours than man ever dreamed.

Kingsley goes on to describe: She sat quite still with her chin upon her hand, looking down into the sea with two great grand blue eyes, as blue as the sea itself. Her hair was as white as the snow - for she was very very old - in fact, as old as anything which you are likely to come across, except the difference between right and wrong.

And, when she saw Tom, she looked at him very kindly.

“What do you want, my little man? It is long since I have seen a water-baby here.”

Tom told her his errand, and asked the way to the Other-end-of-Nowhere.

“You ought to know yourself, for you have been there already.”

“Have I, ma’am? I’m sure I forget all about it.”

“Then look at me.”

And, as Tom looked into her great blue eyes, he recollected the way perfectly.

Now, was not that strange?

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Tom. “Then I won’t trouble your ladyship any more; I hear you are very busy.”

“I am never more busy than I am now,” she said, without stirring a finger.

“I heard, ma’am, that you were always making new beasts out of old.”

“So people fancy. But I am not going to trouble myself to make things, my little dear. I sit here and make them make themselves.”

Well, as you might imagine, I am altogether bewitched. Mother Carey is derived from Mater Cara, or Virgin Mary, and it is both a French and English 18th-century nickname for storm petrels, who themselves were believed to warn those at sea of an approaching storm. Somehow it connects with my longing for Msida and my Eisbergfreistadt fancy, as if all things point to each other. And I am immensely consoled by the notion that I too might have no obligation to make things; it is quite enough to sit and make them make themselves.

The entire book, by the way, is available online at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kingsley/charles/k55w/index.html. Go there, and be charmed.

Msida, or L'Imsida

Well, dear reader (I'm certain there's at least one), as Emily Litella was wont to conclude, "Never mind." My last lugubrious post is a distinctly never-mind moment.

As it happens, not only is "Misida" a significant locale, it has its own Wikipedia listing. It exists - and not just in my own mind. It is, in fact, one of the "most important and beautiful towns in Malta," with a population of over 7,000.

It is pictured above (photograph taken by Galen R. Frysinger), and if I have my way, I will find my way there.

In the meantime, I visit in the time machine of my mind, via the postcard from below...

Misida

For years the postcard pictured above has stood on my dining table. Today in an idle moment I resolved to explore its origin. When I've been bereft (a not unenviable condition, as it happens), I have imagined I would stroll the Misida Quay, and be consoled.

(I am remembering here Kurt Vonnegut, in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, one of my dearly beloved books, having his protagonist advise, "If thou would be unloved and forgotten, be reasonable.")

It is here, on the Misida Quay, somewhere in the early nineteenth century, that I have often found my senses. I arrive as the small figure in white, and leave as the purposeful and energetic fellow passing.

As it turns out (compliments of a Google search) I have discovered that Misida is ostensibly on Malta, as the photograph from the antique postcard above describes. The Digital Globe map merely confirms that it is a "populated place," though its precise geography can be established: Lat:35,8925 Long:14,48278.

However, upon closer inspection of the map above, the town appears to be inland on the Aegean Sea side of Malta, so the context of its purported quay remains a mystery. George Nelson Godwin, a "Chaplain to the Forces," made rather disparaging note of Misida ("an unhealthy neighbourhood," to quote him) in his 1880 Guide to the Maltese Islands, also pictured above. It appears Sir Alexander Ball much improved the locale by constructing a stone quay and wide road. Perhaps this postcard demonstrates this very achievement.

Godwin writes, "Misida is variously interpreted to mean 'the valley of fishing,' or 'the fishers' or 'the Mother of Our Lord.' Ah, I think to myself: so that is why I hie myself to Misida.

Misida does not have to exist, or can exist only marginally. Spiritual refuge is the province of one's soul.

The Golden Apple of the Moon

The photo above was taken in Tacoma, WA, though not by moi. My poor camera in adjacent Gig Harbor was not up to the task, but oh, what a treat to have immediately found this one on the Internet! It's an AP photo taken by Ted S. Warren - to whom I proffer my thanks.

Anyhow, tonight's lunar eclipse was simply magical to have observed, and reminded me of when I first saw a whale breach in Alaska: until that moment I had not fully believed whales exist. I am always mildly surprised to discover the world outside my own little overwrought mind actually exists. There's nothing like first-hand observation of a momentous phenomenon to drive the point home.

Tonight's experience also immediately brought to mind the wonderful lines from Yeats in which he pledges to:

Pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

The lunar eclipse left the impression of the sun superimposed upon the moon, as if it were the synthesis of the sun and moon, as if it were a golden apple of the moon. It was an honor to have seen it.

Cat's Eye

This is an image of the Cat's Eye nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, courtesy of NASA and the European Space Agency, who report:

Nebulae like this form when dying stars heat up and eject their outer layers of gas into space. Dust grains [of silicon and oxygen] form in the gas as it expands into space and cools. This will be the fate of our sun near the end of its life about five billion years from now.

One of my great frustrations about mortality is that I (presumably) won't get to know how It All ends: Earth, and her story. To have even an image of the sun's fate five billion years hence is somehow a consolation, particularly in view of how spectacularly beautiful its terminus will be (how luminous its terminus).

Anyhow, the notion of dust grains in space makes me think of Blake's Auguries of Innocence, "To see the world in a grain of sand." It's as if we're not just seeing the world but the very cosmos itself in that grain. I am greatly moved by both the concept and the photo, which in turn brings to mind a recent word discovery, chatoyant, meaning "changing in luster or color, like a cat's eye at night."

Chatoyant

Luster
would be
reward enough

But that it
changes
shimmers
into something more
is more
grace
than I
can sing,
making
me think
that, no less
than the death
of stars,
our deaths
too
will be a
shimmering
into
something
more.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Volcano: Cotopaxi in Morning Light

I
We do not see the volcano
In the Garden of Eden,
But it is always there.

II
I have been to the
Volcano, as have
You.

III
Sometimes the volcano
Comes to us, its candent
Fury our punishment.

IV
Or is it our reward:
Its cruelest magma
Birthing richest soil?

V
There is beauty in its merciless
Path:
Feral, as in causing death;
Fertile, as in bearing life.

VI
I fear its power.
It betrays us all.

VII
Who among us
Is not betrayed?
Has not betrayed, as well?
Volcanoes themselves
Are ducts
For the Earth’s tears,
Kepler cried.

VIII
If we live at the edge
Of the volcano,
Will we not be
Destroyed?

IX
When we bring our cup of betrayals
To its seething core, what do we destroy?

X
Where molten lava
Has cooled,
New growth blossoms.

XI
It is your Book of Blossoms,
Attentive to nuance not yet heard,
I want the world to know.

XII
Sing the Beauty,
And not the Betrayal.

XIII
Even if eruption is nigh.

Distrail

I can't quite track what mental trail led me to the concept of distrail, but once explored I was fascinated yet again by what I haven't known. Years ago I was very moved by Leonard Shlain's proclamation in The Alphabet versus the Goddess that, "Fish have not yet discovered water." It seems to quite sum up the condition of existence, or at least to sum up for me how little I know about the physical world, living in it though I purportedly am.

So, to distrail.

The website http://www.weatherscapes.com explains it as follows:

A distrail, short for dissipation trail, forms when an aircraft flies through a supercooled cloud. The cloud freezes due to the disturbing airflow created by the aircraft, as well as by the addition of plenty of freezing nuclei due to the aircraft's exhaust gases.

It is disconcerting to me to think that such a thing of beauty (do check out some of the images on the web for distrail) is created by what is otherwise a violation of the elements. Smog itself, of course, creates the loveliest of sunsets. The perpetual paradox, giving rise to my lines below:

Distrail

It was folly to think
that clouds were
invincible,
but they were young
and required hope
to dare,
or, if not that exactly,
required at least the absence of
Futility, and its
trailing servant,
Despair.

Then
the inevitable
occurred,
(as it must,
as it always has):
the perfect sky was
ruptured, blurred:
a "dissipation trail" that cleaved
the blameless clouds.

(The agent of this tragedy
needs no name.
It is all the same,
whatever bears the shrouds.)

For years after they ceased
to seek the skies, but
now, grateful to raise their heads,
they bless sunset, sunrise:
at peace with rupture gone unmended.

Finding beauty
where no beauty was
intended.

Ode to a Tongue: Unretouched, and Not So Much

(In honor of Karma, the Once and Future Blue-Tongue Dog)

Here's to a tongue like a slide
we could ride.
Here's to a tongue
that makes us ask where he's from.

Hymenoptera

Speaking (as I was in a previous post) of von Karman vortices, I am thrilled to have discovered the phenomenon has a further relevance to the great and long-unsolved mystery of insects' flight. I kid you not.

Vortices are in fact created around insects' wings when they fly, which would in theory slow them down. Instead, recent research using a "Robofly" shows that insects are able to convert the energy loss (or "drag") by rotating their wings before starting the return stroke. As Alan Hall writes in Scientific American, "The maneuver dubbed wake capture allows insects to utilize energy that would normally be lost. As the wing moves through the air, it leaves trailing whirlpools, or vortices, of air behind it. If the insect rotates its wing before starting the return stroke, the wing is bouyed up on its own overtaking wake just as a boat will rise on the following wave if its engine is shut down." In effect, insects go backward in order to go forward, and who could not love the Heraclitean paradox of that?!

As I contemplate the lot of us (and there are a lot of us) who plunge so headlong into our lives, every minute of the day thrusting warp-speed ahead, trying vainly to be impervious to the vortices which inevitably slow us down ("Isn't it a drag?"), well, perhaps there's a lesson here. Perhaps if we were only to take that moment to pause and regroup, then to thrust ahead, our continuance would be vouchsafed.

A paean to the pause (as well as to the wake), then: hear, hear! (We could be like the bee, cooed Ms. Beebe.)

By the way, I am longing to have titled this "Hymen Opera" (and not just because of the above-mentioned Heraclitean paradox), but I didn't think I should take the metaphor in quite that direction.

Eisbergfreistadt

In honor of today's caucus results, in which Obama surfaced as the winner, I bring you the Eisbergfreistadt cards, displayed above, of which I have a dearly beloved deck. As its creators explain:

Eisbergfreistadt was a set of souvenir playing cards originally created for the Iceberg Ball of 1923. Eisbergfreistadt was a temporary city state founded upon a vast arched iceberg that arrived in the Baltic Sea off of Lubeck, Germany during the time of the Great Inflation. These reproductions of an original dual English/German language deck feature the four suits: birds, chimneys, icebergs and weeds, and follow the German abbreviations for the face cards. The entire deck placed end to end forms one continuous panorama, while the two Jokers tell the warning tale of man's folly and nature's revenge.

So, Obama's win, and this charming deck of cards: what's my point?

I suppose they both make me ask how we differentiate between what is real, and what is, well, just spin. Today at the caucus a woman urged a vote for John Edwards, believing that the Clinton/Obama competition is a forced choice engineered by Republicans who believed it would splinter the party. And I do wonder, brought at moments to tears as I am by Obama's persona, is he who he would seem to be, or just another projection of our dreams? Contemporary politics can often seem to be a city built on an iceberg where:

Behold! The flock of birds who choke
Upon the chimneys' fiery smoke
Whose heat doth melt the icy floe
And cause unwanted weeds to grow.

Are we in our right minds, to dare to hope? It calls to mind one of my favorite Edna St. Vincent Millay couplets, "Second Fig":

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

And oh, is it an iceberg on which we now play out our dreams? We know, of course, the fate of icebergs, even those without cities built upon them.

Thus, I suppose, I am torn between despair and foolish flights. I build my house of cards, with full knowledge of its not-so-stationary status, and sigh when it falls, yet build again. We all keep building again.

It is true that in 1923 an iceberg floated into the port city of Lubeck, Germany. The rest is the genius of Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick, the card deck artists, who sure know how to make a pertinent political statement.

If you, too, need to ponder the tale of your fragile hopes in our perilous future, Eisbergfreistadt cards can be found at:

www.kahnselesnick.com/store.htm

Von Karman Vortices

I have just learned about the von Karman vortices, and am once again in rapture. Every time I encounter yet another elementary phenomenon of science or math I rue the hours I spent in school disparaging every science and math class I was forced to endure while I more sensibly pondered the Meaning of Life. How did I fail to realize science and math are themselves the very beacons into the deepest wisdom of the universe, as penetrating as the pantheon of great minds throughout history, as piercing as poetry?

But never mind. Let me redress the oversight now.

Von Karman vortices, as no doubt everyone else knows, refers to the phenomenon whereby, when fluid or air flows over and around objects, spiraling eddies are formed. This might be observed in a bathtub or a river, the ocean or the atmosphere. The first image above is of swirls in Hudson Bay, Canada. The second image was taken as winds swept east across the northern Pacific Ocean and encountered Alaska's Aleutian Islands.

How is it that water and air encountering solidity and then parting and eddying in such graceful spirals could be a mere fact of our existence? I am struck over and over by how unnecessary it is that the world in itself should have such beauty. I am also struck by the von Karman vortices' signficance regarding the dynamic between that which is soft and that which is hard. It reminds me of the lines from the Tao Te Ching:

Nothing in the world
is as soft and yielding as water.
Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,
nothing can surpass it.

The soft overcomes the hard;
the gentle overcomes the rigid.
Everyone knows this is true,
but few can put it into practice.

The resistance of the object does not deter the water or air. The elements merely proceed to disperse and increase in complexity and beauty, continuing blithely on their path. It feels instructive: a lesson in accepting resistance with grace. I want to be a von Karman vortex. Perhaps I can learn.

The third photograph, by the way, appears to be from a website in Spanish, so draw your own geographic conclusions since I took three years of French and studied Latin (which I loved). I do like the photograph, though, and urge you to Google images of "von Karman vortices" for your own, um, eddy-fication.