elm seeds

no shadow, no story

Anchor

I know only basic things about the earth's core. For instance, that it is 4,600 miles from here, that it is unlikely there are dinosaurs living there, that it's most likely composed of iron and nickel, and also that it is hotter than magma but solid on account of the pressure it's under. The magnetosphere, the charged bubble that protects life on earth from some of the sun's radiation, depends on the iron condensed in the core. Of the pressure deep within, Logan devotes a paragraph;

This is a pressure on the order of 3,600,000 times the pressure at the surface...At such pressure, alchemy, the conversion of one element into another, becomes a commonplace. Certain rare metals have been observed changing into one another in these anvils, and it is thought that with just a touch more squeeze, diamond itself will change into metal. When the pressure is relieved, however, it changes back. p.85

Some dream the earth has a core of crystallized iron. I suppose all we can do is dream. But some would say the earth's core dreams us. As far away as it is, it is a common point claiming all even as it relegates every one of us to its farthest horizon. The anchor of anchors.

a walk in the gloom

A quotation I came across last week on the subway, while peering over a boy's shoulder: "When I wished to sing of love, it turned to sorrow. And when I wished to sing of sorrow, it was transformed for me into love." ~Franz Schubert

regrowth

Exteriors

On Friday I had one of those very welcome moments when I could recognize one of my own insufficient models of reality, an overly simplistic thought, for what it was. I am still wondering about this unveiling that ocured while walking in Prospect Park. I could see the unconscious concept in question had as little in common with its object as a toy trash truck does with an actual DEP vehicle or a sheet of vinyl has with human skin.

Reflections on bird feathers, a slow realization that each feather on a bird's body is differently shaped by the predicates of being and natural law into a perfect facet of featherness on the gem of a bird's body, grew into a reassessment of human skin. Feathers are one more demonstration of nature's unmatchable intelligence, logic spoken as matter becoming the fact of both life and flight. And human skin, not one homogeneous sheet upholstered to the human body. What encloses the soles of the feet differs vastly from that delicate skin under the arms, on the face, the lips, the inner ear, the palms. Each segment speaks differently with the elements and engineers different possibilities.

I suspect many have more eloquent things to say about interiors and exteriors, but I am left feeling that skin, the border between the perceived interior and exterior, belongs to neither exclusively, is as much shaped by the world as it is by what it encloses, to the extent that it presents no real boundary or isolating event, just a conversation of unmatchable syncopation within an unending sea of infinitely variegated familiars dreaming tangents of flight, warmth, softness, claw.

Every day is Earth Day

So happy Earth day!

Thumbelina's Egg

The light was falling on a Howard St. garden in such a way that I couldn't help realizing that a tulip is a kind of cup that holds sunlight. But Hans Christian Anderson saw it differently; to him a tulip was a nursery from which a tiny woman emerges, full grown.

mound of earth

Pretty, huh? After a year and a half my compost can was full so I dumped it out into a hole my kids had dug in the yard. It didn't smell very bad, I think it's nearly done, I can't recognize anything besides the egg shells, some of which are now rubbery to the touch. It will continue to cook in its hole now, where it's easier for me to stir it up.

I'd been sick for about 3 weeks with a malicious cold when I decided to get out and turn this soil out of its can, though I still felt fairly sick. When I came in from heaving this around and aerating the can's contents I felt remarkably better. Perhaps it was the exercise. Perhaps it was the breath of the earth. As I later read here one old world minister, Methodist Divine John Wesley, counseled consumptives to breathe into a hole cut into the earth daily*. Later scientists would find the cure for tuberculosis in chemicals synthesized by Streptomyces microbes in soil along with the makings of many other varieties of antibiotics including penicillin. It seems Wesley intuitively knew the pharmaceutical promise held by (untainted) earth.

It's been such a pleasure to make this soil, to husband this mound of earth. I know I won't save the earth this way, but I feel it has blessed me, at least. How God must love dirt, the raw material of all this infinitely abundant earthly beauty. How odd it is that so many people take antibiotics every day, medicines that often save their lives, without ever knowing where they come from.

*William Bryant Logan, Dirt, The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth.p.152

cohorts

Dirt the Movie airs tomorrow

Today I read William Bryant Logan's chapter called The Soil of Graves in which he discusses the soil toxifying practice of embalming corpses with formaldehyde. I know this is a morbid subject, I'm sorry, but having smelled the sweet breathe of the soil, I feel strongly the sweetness of the body should become the sweetness of the earth. But it doesn't happen when humans see themselves as over or separate from nature, when we fear and vilify it, impeding its life regenerating processes with formaldehyde. I don't believe dust to dust + Formaldehyde was the holy plan.

Roger Williams and his heretic state have made appearances on this blog before. Here they come again as I borrow from Logan's Dirt: "The founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams, and his wife were buried side by side. Later, an apple tree was planted near the grave. When, decades later, the citizens went to find the bodies to rebury them with honor, it was discovered that they had wholly decayed. Not even the bones were left. A nearby apple tree had wound its roots around the corpses, sucking up the phosphorus of the bones and weaving in living roots the shapes of the dead man and his wife."

Not all of Dirt, the Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, written by Brooklyn arborist Logan, are as necrocentric, for instance the chapter on compost gurus dedicated to "vivifying the soil" is too important to be missed. A movie based on his book airs tomorrow night at 10 on PBS in honor of Earth Day. That is absolutely perfect. Heart and soil, yes.

214 W. 29th St.

I don't think it's a gargoyle, as someone passing by me claimed. More of a troll or gnome, I think. And the Cadaceus here is tasked with delivering the mail. Well, it did belong to Mercury, messenger of the Gods, guide to the dead and protector of merchants, shepherds, gamblers, liars and thieves. I had it confused with the medical symbol, the rod of Asclepius, which bears only one serpent. I guess I'm not the only one.

my neighbor's plant

Cutetastrophe!

Do you also have a sweet tooth for iceberg paintings and nature sprites? Then have a look at Jen's work at her newly founded blog cute{tastrophe.}

lake

For days I bore my eyes into the body of the lake without modesty, in it, out of it, eager to hear the music in the chain of molecules that have brought me from here to there the first time and again and again.

No, it seemed to say after a while. Here's what you can do. Put away your scalpel gaze, soften your eyes like the sunset. You'll make no presentation of me. Instead, sing your silly song and dance your clown dance on the shore. Your pride is bad for you.

Callery Snow

On the corner of Tenth Ave and Windsor a little girl gracefully held a blue hula hoop in motion for a remarkably long time. Neighborhood talent! It was so cheerful to pass by on the way to school.

april in park slope

So sad about Qinghai. I wish I had a comfort blanket to lay over the Province.

lillies

delicate slippers

Blossoms of a pear tree, the fruiting kind, not the Callery Pears that are abundant street trees in New York. On the younger flowers some anthers are pink and full; from what I gather this pink sheath that encloses the anther eventually curls back to expose the pollen. This tiny dance of the veil is very easy to miss.

antelopes

Yeah, I know, nothing to do with Brooklyn. No antelopes here. Pretty sure. Don't care.

love squad

leaves out

On Lookout Hill

A congregation of violets on Lookout Hill, tucked in with plantain (white men's footsteps) once an important medicinal plant in European villages. A pair of red bellied woodpeckers darted among trees on the West of the hill, to the East, two birds raced each other so restlessly I couldn't come close to guessing what they were.

Brooklime

Brooklime, a slip of the tongue or a medicinal herb described in Doctor John Hill's The British Herbal, An History of Plants and Trees, Natives of Britain, Cultivated For Use or Raised for Beauty, published in an age when medical doctors had to also be botanists and astrologers. It was a pleasure to photograph this at work the other day, a welcome break from upholstery.

Modern sources contain similar recipes as the one mentioned in Hill's, sans cobwebs. Herbs2000's Brooklime entry includes this, for instance. "The juice extracted from the brooklime plant, along with the sap from Seville oranges and scurvy-grass, were once known as the ‘spring juice’. This ‘spring juice’ was held in high esteem in earlier times for their ability to cure scurvy. It may be mentioned here that the brooklime plant has always been a favorite herb for healing scrofulous or diseased conditions, particularly of the skin."

unnamed specimen

white stone

What I took for a Windsor Terrace cement stoop started to look porous as I got closer, closer, it showed what looked like tiny shell splinters. I wasn't sure until I saw this little thing, a tiny bit of sea fan, perhaps, that it really was limestone, always a product of ancient ocean floors.

From what I hear the sea floor really gets around, subducted under continental plates, pushed to the margins by magma bleeding aquatic rifts, pressure-cooked as marble, lifted into mountain ranges and then weathered down into solute. Taken up by mollusks and corals all over again. Here in Brooklyn the pelagic relic is rarely out of eye shot, often carved gracefully to complement the stone's oceanic allure. I have a new hobby, looking for these little fans, all the fan that fancy needs as far as I'm concerned. Mermaids must live around here somewhere.

mica trail

A brownstone slab functioning as a banister on a stoop near my house has streams of Muscovite running through. I don't recall I've seen brownstone with this kind of inflection before, but perhaps what I saw when I thought I saw brownstone was actually brownstucco. The traces of mica remind me that the sandstones that ornament Brooklyn, according to Williams' Stories in Stone, are the product of flooding that loaded an ancient valley with sand, silt and pebbles that then hardened into an aggregrate, tinted brown with iron, giving impermanence another go round, maybe a little like scrapple. I assume that the weathering seen on the bottom of the slab tells us that this chunk was rotated 90 degrees from its bedding position and gravity is now helping to separate the layers.

Stoop

Nature imitates culture imitates nature; this brownstone stoop is a feature of NJ erosion. As for the stoops Brooklyn features, these stoeps are an artifact of Dutch architecture, a lowland attempt to keep the parlor floor unflooded. Or so I've learned from Stories in Stone by David B. Williams. The first chapter concerns itself with all aspects of the brown sandstone that builders utilized in the 19th century. One favorite section regards the 18th century eccentric Edward Hitchcock and his obsession with the 'bird' prints found in some samples of the Portland brownstone formation, in particular a sample featuring the prints of what was once called "Noah's Raven," and most significantly, his Jewel of the Cabinet, a sidewalk paving stone found bearing the prints of several extinct creatures on its underside. Here's to the Ichnologist. As Williams writes:

Unlike bones, which tell the story of death, tracks record the action of a living animal. Tracks show young and old dinosaurs of the same species traveling together, different species visiting the same shoreline on the same day, the dinosaurs following each other. "In the 1950's we though that dinosaurs were sluggish, solitary creatures that dragged their tails around behind them," said Sauter. "And now we think of them as athletic and birdlike. They were particularly vicious, and fast runners and jumpers. We found out all this information from these slabs. These actual slabs. It was really a revolution in thinking." p.14

Jersey Stone

In suburban Brookdale Park in Montclair I found this small but impressive outcrop jutting out of the ground at the head of a spring. I stood at its base and my shoe sank into the leafy mush while I took some of these pictures–still no fishing boots. The weathered surface of the rock is a mottled pinkish-grey as you can see, you can only tell from recent fractures that this sandstone is as brown as the Jersey dirt, as a Brooklyn row house.

in bloom

bough

I found some trimmed boughs on the curb, I don't understand why they were so carefully pruned and then abandoned. I recognized the bark of this one as cherry so I brought it home and nested it in a vase of gravel and water. Turns out there was yet life in the limb. Honestly, I never know what I'll find around here. This place must be enchanted.

At Prospect Lake & Update with Water Results

No news about the water results yet. Update: According to park press release, the DEP results returned and the water's fine. More, much more, below.

TESTS OF LAKE WATER CONFIRM A HEALTHY ECOSYSTEM AT PROSPECT PARK

The Department of Parks & Recreation has been informed by the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) that test results of water samples from Prospect Park Lake were normal and that there was no indication of any substances that could endanger wildlife in or around the Lake. The water samples were collected earlier this week at the request of the Parks Department.

Water from Prospect Park Lake (and elsewhere around the Park) was tested in response to the dumping of animal parts into the Lake on two occasions in March. The disposing of any form of garbage – including animal parts and remains – in parkland is against the law. Violators face criminal prosecution and/or fines. Two recent fires in areas of vegetation near the Lake are also thought to be the result of criminal mischief. In response to these incidents, Parks Department personnel and the New York City Police Department have heightened their surveillance of the Lake and adjacent areas of the Park.

In addition to the aforementioned tests conducted by DEP, students and faculty from the Aquatic Research and Environmental Assessment Center at Brooklyn College have been sampling and testing water from the Lake since late fall of 2009. They also report finding no concentrations of substances harmful to the ecology of the Lake.

To further address concerns about the safety of wildlife in the Park, the Urban Park Rangers will work with the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation and the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to identify the cause of illness or death in any dead animals or birds found in the vicinity of the Lake. The recent death of a swan removed from the Park by Animal Care and Control is thought to have been the result of injuries the animal sustained during a fight with another swan (swans are highly territorial birds – especially during the spring mating season). Similarly, the remains of a few other animals found in the Park in the last few weeks – including a duck, turtle and possum – are in keeping with the normal course of wildlife mortality in a large, urban Park at the end of a difficult winter.

“Parks and the Prospect Park Alliance are committed to safeguarding the natural environment of Prospect Park,” said Parks & Recreation Commissioner Adrian Benepe. “We thank DEP for testing water samples from the lake that confirmed that there is no indication of substances that would affect or endanger wildlife. We will remain vigilant in guarding against illegal dumping to best ensure a pleasant visitor experience and a healthy ecosystem at the Park.”

“Everyone working at Prospect Park cares very much about the Park’s ecological health,” said Prospect Park Administrator Tupper Thomas. “Many staff members have devoted years of hard work to the process of restoring and maintaining the Park’s beautiful, natural environment. Every effort will be made to protect the rich ecosystem of wildlife that calls the Park home.”