hornet's nest

A wrathful hornet took revenge upon the gardener who had destroyed its swarm's low hanging nest in the Dove Tree, a canopy of heart shaped leaves and nuts resembling large green olives. The gardener had come back the following day to find the tenacious swarm attempting to recolonize branches of the tree near the spot of the previous day's devastation, so the gardener took up arms, loppers and hose, and cut higher into the tree while drenching the insects to discourage rebuilding, or at least cause them to build a nest high enough so that no garden visitor might casually ramble into a cornupcopia of angery stings.

I heard him holler and, in pain, drop his implements, and when 2 little girls came along soon after, strolling under the locus of the hornet's ambition, I shooed them away, scaring them with too much neurosis. It seems to run in the family, given that two young members of my swarm came to colonize my bed last night, each having dreamed about stinging insects.

boathouse swallows

Barn Swallows, I think. The babies still in the nests wedged into the ornamentation on the boathouse, at least as of yesterday when we passed through. The parents swoop down to snag insects flying above the water and return quickly, regularly, and it's a very beautiful thing to watch the transfer of insect from mouth to mouth, especially when the parents must quickly slow themselves down, spreading their tail feathers in a fan that seems dramatic, gracious, uncharacteristic and in very good keeping with the boathouse's classical embellishments.

July 15-19 the boathouse and environs will be overrun with the Macy's fishing contestants (not a fan, sorry, can't help it, I have trouble with the "open season" mentality) so I hope the swallow chicks fledge sooner than later.

Have a look at Brenda A-Year-in-the-Park's Swallow chick shot here.

smoke bush by the boathouse

sweetharsh

It's startling to see the shock of softness emerging from the thistle, a tower or bristle and spine. Which brings me to Boehme on God and Creation. He tried to translate the indescribable origin of the world, his vision of the separation of God into Abyss and byss, into what he called creaturely language, so we have some chance of understanding something about something that can't possibly be understood. The result is fascinating, tactile, metallic, cinematic, momentus, flashing, abstract and sensory, as if he had studied every quality of a wave bending, crashing, retreating, rejoining, reforming, and all the infinite in between stages that go past faster than the eye. A sample of the metal, from the section "The Gates of God:"

Behold now, when the bitterness, or the bitter sting [or prickle] (which in the original was so very bitter, raging and tearing, when it took its original in the harshness) attaineth this clear light, and tasteth now the sweetness in the harshness, which is its mother, then it is so joyful, and cannot rise or swell so anymore, but it trembleth and rejoiceth in its mother that bare it, and triumpheth like a joyful wheel in the birth. And in this triumph the birth attaineth the fifth form, and then the fifth source springeth us, viz. the friendly love; and so when the bitter spirit tasteth the sweet water, it rejoiceth in its mother, the sour tart harshness, and so refresheth and strengtheneth itself therein, and maketh its mother stirring in great joy; and then there springeth up in the sweet water-spirit a very sweet pleasant source or fountain; for the fire-spirit (which is the root of the light, which was a strong fierce rumbling cry, crack or terror in the beginning) now riseth up very lovely, pleasantly, and joyfully.

red eye

Botanic Garden Collection

The Colonial Waterbirds of North Brother Island

They called it North Brother Island, even if it could have been called Typhoid Island after Typhoid Mary was quarantined at the sanitarium there. Now abandoned and strewn with ruins, the Island's a bird sanctuary. I learned this from this week's edition of "The City Concealed," which, sadly and appropriately, contained no live bird footage. Apparently the Egrets, Herons and Ibises that made use of the place a few years ago no longer nest there. More of the mystery here.

It would have been much sadder to watch this if I hadn't somewhat recently seen a Night Heron flying low in Prospect Park just in front of the Lullwater Bridge.

epaulette tree

big thistle

Growing near the compass at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, at least 3 feet taller than I, covered with fine white hairs that give it an icy look, thorns like fence posts emerging from webbing that grows from the stem, I don't know what it was called, couldn't find a label, but I would certainly call it the Ice King.

Icy like the man blowing the leaves from the entrance who glared at me because I was in his way as I waited at the guard's post for the rest of the children to catch up, icy like the gardener who fussed when I stepped on the dirt in order to see the label on a beautiful banana tree, cold as the bus driver annoyed that I hadn't folded up the stroller before getting on the bus. I was tired. He at least did not seem to indulge in his annoyance as much.

I'm hoping that I've passed a threshold wherein I see those whose hostility prickles as suffering also, lashing out in their suffering, it always seems to be some one else's turn, on and on. Jacob Boehme, a persecuted man, wrote that life is a bath of thistles and nettles. At times, it is also a bath of milk and honey, but maybe those sweeter dips are few and far between for many. How much more sorrowful then are those who find themselves somehow unable to drink when a cup of nectar suddenly appears before the lips.

last petals

...for now, & a little respite from the cave painting weather. I've learned that rose petal tea is a PH indicator, along with many other garden pals, including Horse Chestnut leaves:"Soak horse chestnut leaves in alcohol to extract the fluorescent dye esculin. Esculin is colorless at pH 1.5 but becomes fluorescent blue at pH 2. Get the best effect by shining a black light on the indicator."

That being said, Happy Independence Day.

of the stars

Calendula, belonging to the family Asteraceae (not the Aster family, or it would be much wealthier), bears a name that seems to refer to a cruel roman obsessed with time. But I hear t is in fact a nice plant, said to have anti-inflammatory properties, to promote healthy skin and shrink tumors.

I was surprised to find my plant had produced a flower because it had been such a meager mangy thing, infested with tiny black winged and non-winged things, warped and struggling. Not only has it borne my neglect, its cramped quarters, the exploitation of the insects and the low light conditions of this spring, it now bears this feathery bloom and several buds branching from its stalk.

It seems to be the kind of time-keeping blossom that shuts itself up at night and opens again in the morning.

Veneer

Mount Prospect, High and Dry

A friend warned me about going to Mount Prospect Playground because of pushers but we went anyway. The only pushers there pushed swings. Already at 9:30 there were a few families, some joggers, and a mother with her unicycling daughter. I got in busybody mode to find out why the sprinklers & toilets weren't working (after being at the Chelsea Water Playground the day before my expectations were HIGH.) I was told the drainage system was backed up, and when the toilets flushed the sewage came up through the drains. They were hoping the plumbers would show up. A graceful cement seal, its snout broken where the pipe emerges, is one of three fountains, fountains that appeared small to me, thanks to my visit to Chelsea.

The park, a chunk of land bordered by the Botanic Garden, Brooklyn Public Library and Flatbush Avenue, ascends from the steps on Eastern Parkway to the playground, above it, a ball field which is circled by a asphalt path. At a Northern point a set of stairs sweeps up to a platform paved with wide stones which is the second highest point in Brooklyn – or so I've been told on the internet. The view is bound by trees so that you don't see beyond the slopes of the Botanic Garden where we watched a cottontail emerge from and disappear into the grass, and facing the other way, the ball field where someone seems to have arranged trash cans in goal formations, a wide platter of turf worn through in the middle revealing a small desert of yellowish dirt.

I read that there was once a reservoir on Mount Prospect, perhaps where this ball field is, back in the days when people drank local water. The top of a hill seems like an odd place for a reservoir, calling to mind various crater lakes. There's no hint of any crater now, and no hint of lake. But with the forecast looking like it does for the rest of the week, all that could change. Maybe that will mean company for the large yellow mushroom we found, in good condition except where its cap had split into radial lines, as if it wished to imitate a daisy.

Liz's Gowanus

Gowanus in black and white, by Liz Schnore, worth the visit.

High Line

Luckily the High Line was no tightrope, so I didn't fall off. Favorite part, the way the plantings often appear ungardened, weed-like, self-sown. That is fine gardening that hardly seems gardened at all. The Chelsea Waterplayground at 23rd and the West Side Highway is a great end destination if you're walking the line with young ones. Why do not we have such immodest fountains in Brooklyn? Are we too bashful?

The elevated park will not be open on the evening of July 4th. Could have been a great idea. Or not. Definitely would be hard on the plants.

Pier 101

Governors Island Site-Specific Installation

Parts, abandoned by all but artists and their appreciators, and other areas, vacated and off limits to the public, seem to be making a great nesting ground. This nest was guarded by a large gull until it sized us up as dangerous, and possibly stupid. I had no idea I'd find its nest there on the ground.

Governor's Island would make a great bird sanctuary. I imagine it's already providing refuge for many.

Dumbo Rainbow

Coop

Collage by a group of 4-5 year old BK girls. Low maintenance fees! Plenty of black, fertile soil. Hats off to Ms. Amy.

dream house

By Russell. Yesterday I learned the term haecceity, which can be read as "thisness," synonymous with quiddity or less so hypokeimenon, which implies an ideal form from which the actual generates. A term from medieval philosophy, haecceity was revived by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. There's a publication called the Haecceity Papers dedicated to architectural issues. This one, Volume 4 Issue 1, sounds especially interesting to me at the moment. Here, the blurb:

Architecture addresses social structures which are a product of subjective structure; while a "common-sense", psychological interpretation might be that social structures are necessary to keep individual instincts under control, a more psychoanalytical consideration suggests that in fact social institutions and structures are created by the structure of the subject. Hence, for example, rather than the judicial system being in place to help us keep our violent urges under control, it is a product of obsessional structure and creates the illusion that all of us are animalistic creatures who would lose control were it not for the system.

The Western subject seems to have a need for an historical view, a plot-line as it were, a notion of the subject as having been caused. A perspective makes things bearable - we need to have a comfortable sense of inside versus outside. Yet, as we know from psychoanalysis, it is not that simple. We are divided, not complete, subjects and certainly not subjects with an inside and an outside. Perhaps good architecture should remind us of this, but gently, not without an element of surprise or even a degree of uncanniness, and when we are ready for it - like a good analyst. The essays collected in this volume explore the issue of psychoanalysis and architecture from varying and differing angles, attempting to shed light on the relation of the unconscious to the built environment, and vice-a-versa.

The power of a space is quiet, I've noticed recently the slight sensation that when I enter a certain room or space, part of me becomes it, as if instantly intermixed with the qualities that arrangement of form offers, whether it's a bright, refined area or a crowded, dark one, an appealing, navigable system or one that speaks of abrupt departures. Like the school as it looked yesterday, with all the student work removed from the bulletin boards, which made me feel a little mournful. During the school year the teachers and their students build small societies with goals and rewards and challenges to grow towards, and then, at the end, the power structure simply unravels, the rope dropped. It takes some getting used to for some, for others, it's a joy ride.

Brooklyn in a Dream

We were driving all over the periphery of the borough, over too fast highways, magnetically clinging to the angular dynamism of bridge steel, looking for an indeterminate destination. We find it, a housing project that resembles a quad at an old University, but where the Gothic heaviness is sweetened with the comeliness of a patchwork of Tudor chocolate/vanilla details. A visual playground, the building speaks of the fattening of essence that derives when all occurrences are viewed as diamond-solid learning experiences of particular personal worth, and also the feeling of discovering one's unique sensibility as receiving the supernal gift. And other things.

I'm told we won't be staying in that building, but a shorter one across from it, white, with wider windows and fewer stories. I press the buzzer. Before going in, I notice the tree in the court, which seems to blow to the left with bonsai lyricism. Its flowers are brown papery wheels or spirals, as numerous as galaxies, cascading in clusters that build like the movement of a passion. Up close, I see it has fruits, and taste them. They are tender, granular, sweet and nutty, coated with crumb, they are nut ball cookies. Very fortifying.

True Value Hardware

The key maker's work bench stands hidden behind a partition, as if they were trying to hide it, but they can't mask the sound. Waiting my turn, I watch the man at the works load the master key in the slot to the left and the blank into the one at the right, check alignment, pull levers, I hear speed scream as the saw carves topography in the brass, slivered curls and grinder's dust shooting down to the pile of menaced metal collecting in the cavity below the machine.

I wonder if it was like that when the cosmos spawned me, was there a master key and furious, abrasive wheel?

It doesn't matter, it can stay secret. But here's the sad part, even though I come into this moment with a specific relation of grooves, I still try to make myself as if I myself made and make the terrain, as if I create myself, as if in my grandiosity I can improve on the work of the key maker. Even as the assault of the saw that cut my form from the virgin metal still tears through me, and I sense I owe my being as much to irritation as to attraction, and I realize with fear, or irritation, or stimulation, or ecstatsy, the saw's not finished yet.

Good Ideas

Thankfully replacing these five-year-old bulbs was not the daymare I thought it would be. They'd been so reliable I began to think they'd never wear out. The elegance of halogen bulbs is that, unlike in other bulbs where the tungsten filament wears out through evaporation, the halogen gas in the bulb binds with the evaporated tungsten from the filament and redeposits it on the filament. Too clever! Srsly!

My father loves to tell the story of Thomas Edison's invention process, how he'd sit on a chair with a marble in his hand, basically falling asleep, but never soundly, because as soon as he did he'd drop the marble and wake himself up. I wonder how he learned to mine that insane/profound zone between sleep and awake for the answers he was looking for. Apparently dropping a marble is very different from losing one.

Peace Train

K, a neighbor I talk to every year and a half or so, wound up standing in front of me on the F platform, so we talked about the Middle School where both our daughters attend, the Willie Mae Rock Camp that I keep hearing great things about, and an unfortunate grade 6 science teacher. On the train, his hand gripped the steel pole, a pink swath blocking the metal, a finger bearing a silver peace ring. He is active with a group called The Peace Alliance which I gather aims to create a U. S. Department of Peace.

K told me about work done in a prison in Washington State where some sort of alternative to violent conflict was introduced. They expected the program might reduce the rates of assaults within the group participating somewhat, but no one was expecting that it would reduce them to zero. As he told me the story my heart liquified there on the subway and I began to wonder about what sort of program it was exactly, but I have no answers yet. I think it would be amazing to get a handle on the nuts and bolts of something so powerful. I guess that's what a Department of Peace might do.

Blow It!

Another From Sybil Colby

I plucked this from the pile of rotting music I can't get rid of. In the Masked Ball, the heroine Amelia falls for her husband's boss, the governor Riccardo. Guess what happens to their love? Hint, it's an opera.

My little one keeps quoting this line to me which she picked up somewhere: "Hey, who turned on the dark?" I really should know where she's getting her lines, she's only 4. So, who did? Maybe soon the sun will be able to take its mask off and tell me.

On Saturday I asked my son what he wanted for breakfast and he said "Romantic Comedy." I'll take some Romantic Comedy for breakfast tomorrow too, with some sun.

Nettles and Milk

A sympathetic apple saw fit to share this video with me yesterday, seeing my fascination with Nettles hasn't yet diminished. It was my first exposure to Salad Fingers, who seems to hail from the same long shadows which have issued such bat-winged things as Eraser Head, Edward Scissor Hands, Tales of the Gimli Hospital, and The Kingdom.

My father brought up Milarepa (the nettles eater) yesterday during ritual father's day well wishing. Here I am a fan, and I had no idea he was as well, in particular of Milarepa's abundant songs, for which some compare him to St. Francis. The apple falls close to the tree.

Tasteless Father's Day Post

The King Oyster mushrooms that I broiled for the paternal breakfast turned out to be inedible. And may this Father's day be un-Oedipal.

[In case you pity my husband please know he was satisfied with the omelet.]

If not the sun

the pinapple also rises.

bubbles, spilled milk, thrown stones

I printed out this post on secrecy this morning, and then accidently gave it a bath in milk. Later I came across this on a similar theme and thought they made good Saturday morning book ends for the unnameable. I haven't had a chance to spill anything on the second post yet. But back to secrecy, maybe you've also noticed somewhere along the line that it's a fine thing when one can begin to have a relationship with something that can't be pinned down like a willing husband.

I've come across many models of the slippery stuff we call mind lately, sky, ocean, mirror, lake and moon, and most recently wax, which I appreciate very much because it calls the body, long abused and regulated to the category of the corruptible on account of its tendency to decay and perceived imperfection, into the mix of being. What is psyche without soma? Unlike the mind, the body doesn't lie, which makes it both dangerous and redeeming.

And every body, a sacrificial victim. In a book I found on the street lately I read a legend that presents an explanation for mortality. According to the story, the first woman created asked her maker "How is it? Will we always live, will there be no end to it?" So he picked up a buffalo chip and he told the woman, "I will take this buffalo chip and throw it into the river. If it floats, when the people die, in four days they will become alive again, they will die for only four days. But if it sinks, there will be an end to them. So saying, he flung the buffalo chip into the river - and it floated. But the woman picked up a stone and said "No, I will throw this stone in the river; if it floats we will always live; if it sinks people must die, that they may always be sorry for each other." The woman threw the stone into the river and it disappeared. "There," said Old Man, "you have chosen. There will be an end to them." p.128, Heart of the Land, Jack Welch, "The Far Away People."