sybilance

I found a copy of Robert Graves' Greek Gods and Heroes today at the dump here in Cape Elizabeth, Me. That was the only place so far that I've see any pigeons in this state. In the strange shelter where you drop your trash they were playing an ear thrashing recording of some electronic avian in order to keep the scavenging birds away. We asked what the noise was, thinking at first that it was some sort of actual bird trapped within the building's corrugated metal walls, and were told by a man working the site that it was his perpetual headache, a noise that only served to attract what it was designed to deter.

Tonight the small Graves volume was bedtime reading. I came across "Melampus and Phylacus", a surprisingly cheerful Greek myth. This was welcome because it wasn't so cheerful when King Midas killed himself in embarrassment over his ass ears. Melampus caught my attention because it has the same message as Grimm 17, The White Snake, a theme that startles me because it seems to speak of some kind of snake dependent reverse fall .

One day Melampus of Pylus prevented his servants from killing a brood of snakes, whose mother had been run over by a cart. In gratitude, the little snakes wriggled into his bed while he slept and licked his ears with their forked tongues. Melampus woke up and found that he could understand the language of birds and insects. Though disappointed to find how dull their conversations usually were, he sometimes overheard most interesting secrets.

Brooklyn afternoon

it's a long climb

Unpacking

All kinds of squash unfolding before our eyes; I am dumbfounded by their gestures. Excuse the hot air, but Hail Cucurbita!

The middle picture is a gourd plant. I am so excited to be growing gourds, don't ask me why... but why not, you can make drinking vessels for the thirsty, bird feeders and houses, rattles, and as I just learned, flutes.

East 4th St. sunflower (in the making)

Hugo was in

At some point last year I found myself standing in front a steel storefront painted dull dark brown, wondering what the heck was in there. A man came to the door and asked if I wanted to come in, and the truth was, I did want to go in. So I went.

I found myself in a room lined with floor to ceiling shelves holding vintage electronics, mostly radios I think but other mysterious things as well. Then in the back, a machine shop that would make a perfect set for a Guy Maddin movie. Between sight and sound, I was getting dizzy; Mr. Picciani is very generous with stories, a top notch oral historian of NYC. I stayed for stories, wishing I had a memory like his, and asked if I could come back and bring my camera. He told me to come back and bring my husband.

I didn't have my husband when I found myself in front again last week and to my surprise he came to the door. I asked him what he was up to, he said mostly charity work, informally. He said he was nearly broke from giving his money away to friends in need. I told him he should open his shop as a museum but I fear I meddle too much. But maybe he'll let me pay him to fix my broken camera in his custom machine shop. If he does cameras.

He hasn't always worked as a machinist. At one point he was the curator for the South Street Seaport Museum. Back in those days he was friends with Joseph Mitchell, and that's how I heard about the book The Bottom of the Harbor. Mr Hugo didn't think I'd be able to find a copy of it though, back in the days he worked in the Museum neither he nor Mitchell could get their hands on a copy. Someday I'll have to remember to give Hugo one.

Here's more about Hugo Picciani on vimeo.

on milkweed, left and right

There was a plant on the left side of the yard that had drawn flies and a honey bee. When I looked I saw that the flies were dead, dangling in the wind like odd trophies, suspended by legs which they had been unable to extract from the flowers. What strong mechanism must allow the milkweed to trap such fine thread-like limbs. I prodded the honey bee, she didn't go anywhere, so I figured she was also a prisoner. Perhaps milkweed's embraces would kill this one too. I have only seen 4 honey bees so far this year and I snapped, got a seam ripper and a nail file and crushed the flowers until this one was free. Her feet were damaged and still bearing bits of the flowers which she tried to chew off. They didn't keep her from taking flight though, and soon she bumbled high over my head.

On the right side of the yard I've found no corpses dangling from the milkweed flowers. Perhaps they are slightly more generous or perhaps birds have already come along and pecked off the evidence. Over there I've frequently seen large bumble bees, smaller bees, syrphid flies and the attractive insect in coattails with attractive banded undergarments.

Gulliver

In the middle of a 5th Avenue crosswalk I found this unfortunate pilgrim upside down and clawing the air. At three inches in length, he was hard to miss. I slid him onto my notebooks and sat with him nearby for a few minutes - it didn't look good, he had a puncture to his upper abdomen and was only moving his front legs. Nevertheless I found a box in a trashcan to bring him home to Brooklyn. I carried him like a pizza delivery - on the Subway I suddenly heard his wings going full speed and thought maybe a little rest was all he needed. Walking home from the train I passed by a copy of Gulliver's Travels someone had stood against their fence for the taking, and thought that seemed a fitting name for one so large (and helpless.)

Once home he came out of the box to flap his wings more and make a go of it but, because only his front wings were working, he just went around in circles. We put him back in the box for protection and let him be. A while later I peered in the box and saw he was pretty much dead but pulled him out for a closer look. Out in the open air again he moved, somehow raising his thorax up as high as he could. In this ascending gesture he became something like an anthemia to life and left me wondering if the spirit of victory and death do not exclude one another, wondering if death is beautiful in a way one can't imagine.

milkweed

I was keeping on top of the weeds pretty well and then all the sudden I looked and not only had milkweed rocketed up throughout the yard but was ready to bloom. And now I'm helplessly hypnotized by these orbs like the pollinators who sometimes get their legs stuck in the somewhat tricky blossoms, but I know better than to rub the elmer's glue sap in my eyes - you can go blind. So far I've only seen the extra large bumble bees enjoying the flowers.

wind's teeth

Walking down 5th St. on the way to talk to the school guidance counselor about NYC public HS options for my daughter this circle caught my eye. It belongs to a book, a textbook on poetry someone set on their stoop for the taking. This is common practice here in Brooklyn. Never in my life have I seen a textbook on this subject. I opened at random and found The Manoeuvre by William Carlos Williams.

I saw two starlings
coming in toward the wires
But at the last,
Just before alighting, they

turned in the air together
and landed backwards!
that's what got me - to
face into the wind's teeth.

Here in Brooklyn European Starlings are everywhere. When they fly you can see they don't have a lot of wing but what they lack in wings they make up for in galaxies of tiny white speckles. Half the year their beaks are black but in spring they turn yellow to impress each other. Yellow lipstick anyone? They've been on this continent for only about 120 years since 100 were let loose in Central Park by an industrialist who wanted to bring to the New World every bird mentioned in Shakespeare.


They're not going anywhere, so why not learn from them? I like the idea of making WCW's starlings one's guru in the discipline of facing off against the forces that drive you - becoming conscious of the unconscious and powerful tendencies that we are all subject to. I notice in meditation that thoughts often ride in on winds of strong emotions that sneak in, taking the clear living mirror of a lucid mind and turning it into a crumpled ball of paper mired with the same old choking dust of fear and resentment.

I have found it exhilarating to watch these internal winds arise without letting them harden into words that reduce the mystery to falseness.

*image by Martin for Poems to Remember by Dorothy Petitt, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.

2nd-hand toy

A while ago we found this little expanding octopus in front of the Montauk on the way to school. Then it got lost. Then it turned up again. Then it got lost. And then it turned up. Then someone gave it a tall drink. At this point, I think this cephalopod is fully hydrated. Now that I know what size it really wears, I am going to sew a pair of pants for it.

Roots and Churro

It was a bright moment in the kitchen on Saturday when I heard this story about sacred sheep being returned to the Navajo while I absent-mindedly took pictures of these roots, branching from a sprig of rue I'd salvaged in early spring.

Iris

These bloomed last month but I didn't feel motivated to publish this until now. Seems appropriate for this day, when for a little while I have found refuge in the land of "no trying," and the formless was allowed to remain unformed. Just barely.

dark white

bruised

a little blue

A little red

...goes a long way. I found a 1955 copy of The Happy Holisters and the Trading Post Mystery on the street. Above, the illustration on the inner cover. Images of happy families that abound in media of the era and more recent ones had me fooled for a long time. I really thought families were supposed to be happy like that all the time. Ha!

In Sky Dancer there's a part where Guru Rinpoche (Padmasambhava, Pema Jungne) remarks that it was good that his disciple, Yeshe Tsoygel, had difficulties completing an errand. This is good, difficulty is purification, he said. Some remarks go straight to the marrow.

In an umbel

Relaxing the Head

Uncommon perspicacity: Tao Teh Ching 71

He who regards his intellectual knowledge
as ignorance has deep insight.
He who overrates his intellectual achievement
as definite truth is deeply sick.
Only when one is sick of this sickness
can one cease to be sick.
One who returns his mind to the simplicity
of the subtle truth is not sick.
He knows to break through conceptual knowledge
in order to directly reach the subtle truth of the universe.
This is the foundation of his health!

It's not easy to distinguish belief from reality, experience from occurence, or concepts, mere artificats of cognition, from Being. It is hard to cut loose from these artificial anchors. What helps?

Relaxing the neck

Nora's dancing bird, a drawing I found leafing through a sketchbook yesterday.

bound hawsers and fish tail

At Fort Tilden. There was a baby shark lying dead on the beach. I thought about taking a picture but couldn't come to terms with it. I think this drawing my son later did - a shark mobile, he calls it, was inspired by the encounter with the sad animal.

through the crack

ventilation

over there

I was looking for the young Night Heron who I seem to have developed an attachment to. Something tells me it doesn't share the bond. I saw one adult by the rustic shelter, another smaller one closer to the Binnen bridge, and believe I saw a flash of the youngster flying from around the same area. Later I spied it far away on the other shore so, following in the footsteps of a similarly telephoto-challenged friend, I used my binoculars for a boost. The young one looks tired to me, perhaps from all that night fishing.


Two Green Herons flew in on the near shore. They can seem so neckless, and alternately, like they are half neck. Tricky birds. Grackles were eating some kind of fruit from a tree overhead; I could hardly see them, but could hear the gentle sound of their bodies brushing against the tree leaves punctuated by an occasional echoing plunk as the berries they knocked loose fell into the lullwater.

finial

A bold Mockingbird was driving this hawk from perch to perch, repeatedly assaulting it from the back, claws first. At first the raptor appeared nonchalant, but after awhile the smaller bird seemed to get on its nerves, judging by the plaintive squawks of this baby-faced predator. The Mockingbird wanted it out of the vicinity and was heartily kicking its red tail. Protecting treasures such as these, maybe?

Elizabeth Arms

Yesterday just after it rained I visited a friend to pick up my daughter. When I got there the kids were making spin art and I noticed my friend had her sheet music open to Debussy's Sunken Catherdral. She played the opening bars for me so I could hear the music's expansiveness, and it's true, each chord took flight off the wires of the score like Osprey over the Sound, approaching unapproachable wingspans. She said she likes to play Debussy's watery music in the rain.

It hadn't been raining when we went to the Sunken Forest last Sunday, and it might as well have been a cathedral. A dwarf forest sheltered in between sand dunes, a tangle of 200 year old quasi bonzai holly and sassafras trees with windows that opened out to scenes of the shore of the bay. The path heads west on a boardwalk through this sandy canyon of forest until you get to a platform, deep in a holly forest where we heard the rackle of grackles. Then uphill towards the Eastern dune, climbing high surrounded by invisible warblers hidden in the gnarled and salty growth. Finally rising over the canopy we viewed the swale echolocuted by still more invisible birds, the open air perfumed with panicles of cherry.

Sinking it slow falling isn't it? What's the significance of a Sunken Cathedral, and has the sunken meadow really sunk? I'm told the Sunken forest hasn't, it just appears that way.

souvenir

White pebbles I picked up in the Fire Island swash. They were conspicuous to me because of how well they masquerade as beans; navy, great northern, baby lima. They must have been cooking a long time but they're still not soft.

Also emerging from the ice cold sea, something we didn't take home. An animal that looked like a pale, squishy onion that had a nub on top and some sort of appendage retracting into a central greenish yellow orifice on the bottom. Once we realized it was alive my daughter took pity on it and tried to scoot it back into the sea. She was at the same time repelled by it so its trip back into the surf was not a very smooth delivery. People passing by also had no idea what it was, the best they could wager was that it was an extra large cocktail onion, so I'll go with that for now. I would call it a radiolarian but at the size of a plum it would have made a gargantuan protozoa.

Maybe whatever it was enjoyed the neutralizing of extremes effected by the surf. The sand was so burning hot that day, and the water so freezing cold, that in the end the thermostat of my feet was so tweeked I couldn't tell the difference in the extremes anymore. My feet had gone blind.