AT PLAY AMONG THE FLOWERS

native rhododendron

It is the time of year for the second run of flower openings. First, daffodil, forsythia, crocus. Rhododendron are popping open now,the cucumber trees in  full flower, the bluets in full flower, the heart-shaped leaves of the wild violets pull their stems tight reaching for the sun. The rhododendron are covered in clusters of a pink found only in flowers. Mountain laurel will bloom next month. Irises are beginning to bloom. Yellow Dutch iris are opening, the purple ones yet to open. I've transplanted a dozen small clusters of purple Dutch iris from a place where they were spreading out into a tire track where a pickup goes to drive through the gate to the suburban donkey meadow. The irises needed trimming back. I'm taking them to Carpenter's summer cabin where I plant them strategically to inhibit erosion. Somebody you find in the yellow pages under landscaping was hired to direct rainwater away from the house's foundation. He fixed it so the rainwater could only flow directly to the foundation. I've been doing damage control ever since. After a few years of being knocked off my track by what he did, I'm seeing what can be done for damage control. He put treated 6x6s around the parking area to make it into a pond during a big rain. He put a drain in the parking area that doesn't work like new after a few years. Water runs over the 6x6 rail creating ruts from water flow in the same place every time. I planted the Dutch iris clusters to slow down the flow of water downhill from the parking space runoff at the lowest point in the rail. 

new dutch iris bed and rhododendron

Already, I've put in a large area of purple Dutch iris that spreads wildly and some yellow Dutch iris that spreads just as fast. Irises, daylilies and at least a dozen Joe Pyes, more come up every year. I've found a couple of small mountain laurel for digging up to transplant. Thought I'd do it later in the day to give them the night to adjust to their new spaces before a day drenched in sun with torn roots in new soil, though the same soil, moved no more than thirty feet. I'll look after them with water daily to keep what they have left for roots supplying water to the leaves above. I get their core roots, but the root tips with the root hairs feeling their ways through the soil are largely lopped off. I keep them watered good, without drowning them, to give new root tips a chance to develop and begin their explorations through the topsoil. The ground is what I call glorified beach sand. My feeling is that corn was grown there for so many years, plus DDT, year after year, the soil was depleted. I remember plowing old man Tom Pruitt's garden. The soil was gray. The garden was in the same place since the house was built, around 1908. It would only grow things that grow in poor soil. He would hoe a trench for the seeds and sprinkle fertilizer along the rows with the seeds. This land the Carpenter's house is on has been let grow up into woods for eighty or more years. The spot the house was built on was naturally bare with a grove of mountain laurel beside it, telling me the laurel will take the transplant well. Mountain laurel blooms profusely in the sun. The big flower bed will keep them happy with light. I've planted only flowers that return every year and like full sun. Our winters are not cold enough anymore to keep tulips without digging up the bulbs, wintering them in the freezer and replanting them. Other people do tulips. 

flowering cucumber tree

Initially, I was thinking the vertical leaves of the Dutch irises would hold the autumn leaves in place, accumulate them, a leaf trap. It worked out. Rain and winter dissolved the leaves into the ground, topsoil, nutrients for the roots, a new layer every fall. Seeds are caught too. Small saplings rise up throughout the bed. They're beautiful too. I let them grow among the flowers until they grow three or four feet above the others, still easy to eliminate with long-handled loppers. I'm not growing just pretty flowers. I like to let the flora that grows naturally here mix in with the mostly irises. The irises will have their way. I like to keep it green. The Joe Pyes grow up to ten and twelve feet, saplings the next level in height, then a bed of dutch iris spikes sticking straight up, the flowers a purple only seen in flowers. I placed the iris clusters in a sort of diagonal line to deflect water away from the house, to slow it down and  hold some of it. I made a long berm of leaves and dirt to deflect the river of water flowing down the tire trails from the higher level with the old cemetery. Alas, my berm deflecting the water away from the house can only lead the water to the pond that collects in the parking area. It flows over the barrier during rains, and now has begun to make trenches. I planted the irises to slow the water flow, spread it out, collect and hold some of it. Another slope, the other side of some downhill steps, I planted with fifteen fern clusters last fall. They're all coming up but one. They will spend this year adjusting to the new soil and next year will flourish and start spreading.  

ferns at home

The landscaper who knows nothing about water dug a big trench and put boulders in it to catch water from the roof. The trench is perfectly placed for water dripping off the roof during a sprinkle. But when it rains, the water runs two and three feet beyond the boulder trench and has made its own trench. I wanted to put dutch iris along the new trench to slow the water and redirect some of it. It concerns me about the water beating the leaves to the ground during a rain. Thought I'd pick up some of the smaller rocks from the boulder trench and place them along the parallel trench to slow and redirect the flow of water from the parking zone and roof, thinking in time the Dutch iris will seed the new trench and grow some iris from seed strong enough to withstand the water flow from above. The boulder trench collects leaves and silt. I'm thinking the best thing for it is to let it fill up with silt and leaves and make a flower bed of it, more Dutch irises. Or a fern bed. Ferns and the iris are hardy and love this soil. The boulder trench is nothing but ugly. It's completely in the wrong place. It is in a good place to water a flower bed gently and have runoff below. Making lemonade of lemons. I had two banks covered in daffodils. The landscaper buried them all. I never think of him by name. To me, he's the one who knows nothing about water. I'm over the shock of his travesty by now. This spring I'm there every day doing something. I've seen by now the damage his landscaping has done, a good time to start damage control. Change a place from a lawn canyon to a flower bed that will send seeds downhill every year, ultimately to make a big flowerbed along the edge of the woods. I'm looking to make the place lush with flowering greenery that needs no mowing or any kind of care but trimming saplings and snipping a few things that take up from time to time. 

oak leaves opening

*

THE VIEW FROM THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING

I see the past going away and the future an open void the ongoing present assigns to the past like shredded grass in a lawnmower's wake. It's a time of the future looking dim, but no dimmer than it has looked all my life. In first grade we crawled under the desk pretending an A-bomb was expected to go off nearby. Even then, age 6, I was thinking, this puny desk isn't going to save me from anything, maybe a flying eraser, but that's it. The school building was made of big granite stones. I thought the building would fly apart like a house of cards. Why make a big deal of hiding from something you can't hide from? And who would want to survive? This was the McCarthy time and J Edgar Hoover time, John Birch time, fear of communism, like today's fear of terrorism. It hasn't changed. It's ongoing fear-of, fill in the blank. It's been about controlling the masses by the propaganda of fear since Pearl Harbor. I can't attest for before. From what I've seen in American history, it goes all the way back. Mark Twain's comments on his time are the same as are said of this time. What's the point of paying my attention to the blatantly fake? Yet, seen in a certain light, the politicians, themselves, are funnier than the cartoons. Journalists, like the politicians, have become like fast food workers, the cash register buttons have pictures instead of words. It doesn't matter who writes the McNews. Investigative journalists don't work for the press anymore. The news has become so bizarre that people I never thought would notice are talking about it.  

I can't attach myself to a sinking ship like Japanese sailors did in WW2 when their ships went down. I have too much American in me to do something like that. I can't reverse the momentum, nor would I. We have used fire for heat and light since prehistoric times. Collectively, the Age of Fire brought us into Reason, self-awareness. The Greek god of foresight, reason, is Prometheus, who Godfather Zeus condemned to be chained to a rock, etc, for giving fire to the humans. His problem was the humans would learn reason from fire and no longer need the gods. Prometheus was patient, knowing Zeus would let him go when he needed to know who was plotting to overthrow his power. Electricity is the the second fire Prometheus gave us, to raise us from reason into intuition. He was cut loose not long before electricity was discovered. Mary Shelley's popular novel became Frankenstein, the sympathetic monster no one understood but a little girl as innocent as he was, newborn into an awkward body by the new electricity. We're in the early phase of learning uses for electricity and ways to generate it. Rapid advances open doors to new, even more rapid advances, until, by now our heads are swimming. The entire civilization that went before in the Age of Fire is going away from us, including democracy. Religion and politics are the last to concede to change, and they will, one way or another. Like Karl Marx wrote, if not by legislation, then by revolution. I feel like what we're seeing in our legislators and religionists is the tail end of something that has already changed, the ones ranting hysterically the last ones to get it. 

It is a universal problem, not just American. It is a problem in that we're learning how to do old things in new ways. Like writing. I  used to write with pencil or ink on paper. Then the typewriter came into my life, then the computer. This is the new world we're moving into. I see it in films from all around the globe, and reading around the globe too. The great drama of our time is adjusting to the new world electricity has opened to us. In a Chinese film, a girl with frizzy hair dyed in psychedelic colors, tattoos, piercings, punk makeup, skimpy outfit, passed out drunk. Her grandmother did not know what to make of her. Both are expressions of the confusion. Our old props are going away with the barns. Old belief systems have to go. It doesn't mean the spirit is gone. Only the calcified belief system around the spirit that immobilized the spirit, corralled it, is fading away, its emphasis on mind lacking the self-sustaining quality of spirit. The new keeps on coming in, pushing the old out. Collectively, we have shaken off the old and are living in the new world carrying moving vans of baggage from the Age of Fire, antiques like books, philosophies, art. We older people are appalled to see the new generation uninterested in anything that went before, attached to everyone they know by cell phone. It appears we need to wipe the slate clean, ultimately, of all that went before, attention held by distractions from one to the next while the changes occur around us. I like what I see of the new social attitudes in the young. I've come to believe the young have an intelligence we of older generations cannot understand. I like that and find it promising for the future.

It doesn't mean the future is Utopian. It means the future will be based in new belief systems. Old belief systems have served for so long they have become unwritten laws. One such unwritten law dominates self-editing. From a lifetime of living in a surveillance nation I know has computers set to lock onto key words, I avoid using such words as b-o-m-b and p-r-o-t-e-s-t, among many others. Right of assembly is not a right anymore, if it ever was. Republicans have been systematically dismantling democracy since the coup in 1963. By 2015, it's a done deal. The fascist constitution, the Patriot Act of 2001, voided the original constitution, making the citizen, already shrunk to consumer and taxpayer, enemy of the state. We can be arrested, beaten, killed without recourse by a cop's whim or mistake. Last year the Supremes made it legal for cops to break down a door, enter somebody's house guns blazing, kill a dog and a seven year old, a mistake, wrong address. Fix your own damn door--tough shit about the kid and the dog. Rights? This is the phase we're in, between democracy and whatever follows. Police state always self-destructs, so I assess the self-destruction of police state is in the very nature of fascism, based in hate. Hate has no staying power, only destructive power. The so-called Christians allying themselves with fascism have already committed their own undoing. What I'm looking at for the future is getting through the destruction of our country like the Germans lived through their own destruction and reconstructed a new world. The new world of reconstructed America, no longer Number One, probably will not use two-thirds of our tax dollars toward killing poor people of small, defenseless countries around the globe. No more the entire UN rising to censure the Land of the Free for police brutality and the penal system. We still have in the future collective humanity rising and saying, No More War, meaning it. It's been said a trillion times, though not yet with the meaning it will take to break through the most resistant stain of the old belief systems.

*

LEADING DONKEYS HOME

jenny pushes jack

A week ago I put the donkeys in the other meadow, the one they will not cross the creek to graze. They'd chewed their meadow down to not much left. I can't see them in the other meadow. Even outside, trees obscure the view to the meadow. I only saw them in the mornings when I called them to carrot time and afternoon calling them for sweet grain. I realized yesterday I miss them. Never see them in the window anymore or when I step outside. They rested in the shade of the long row of rhododendron much of the day. Jenny in her sixth month of pregnancy seems careful about running or walking too fast. She follows Jack instead of leading him. She has a quiet, inward attitude in her face and body. Jack wants to be close to her, but she chases him away when he gets too close. He's a bit shy of her. Another case of a man unable to comprehend a woman. She says, leave me alone, and he can't do it, so he goes about perplexed. What's wrong with women? I can see it in his face. It's a classic case of men slow to get it that women are mothers with an important mission. Every woman responds differently, due to physical, emotional and mental circumstances. It's ridiculous to talk about this. It's so particular to individuals, nothing can really be said. The complexities make understanding a course of study. Jack is learning Jenny's ways and how to live with them, same as she is learning his ways and adjusting herself too. This is why I've asked their future human never to separate them. Learning each other is an ongoing donkey kickfest. Time goes by and they kick less. Maybe after some years they'll have their issues worked out. Jenny came into the meadow a year and a half ago kicking and biting. She fought Jack for months. Six months with Jack, she fell in love  and they've been lovers ever since. 

jenny pretends to bite jack

It's true that an observer changes things. They can be grazing peacefully, side by side, and I show up with carrots, they come running. Jenny first. Sometimes Jack is first if Jenny takes her time walking, which she does more and more. Jenny takes her carrot and dives at Jack with her nose to push him away. He stands to the side munching his carrot. He just stands there when he's ready for another, Jenny glaring at him telling him to keep a distance. I step over to Jack to give him carrot. He takes it with a downward glance that says, thanks. Humility is Jack's most notable characteristic, like jealousy is for Jenny. Jack defers to Jenny in every instance, given exceptions. She is bigger than he, which buys her the independence she likes. During play time, they do their martial arts sparring, never to hurt, only to tap, neck wrestle and dodge bites. A donkey is a powerful biter. Considering they chew all day every day, their jaw muscles are strong. I don't want to be bit by a horse or a cow, either. I talked yesterday with a man I know around my age who has a donkey in a meadow with some calves. He knows the donkey, but doesn't interact. He told me he had somebody come to trim the donkey's hooves. He came out of the experience wide-eyed at a donkey's power. Him telling me what they had to do to make the donkey submit made me bug-eyed. I must be having Jack's hooves trimmed soon. Curious how he will take to it. First, I must find a halter and put it on him. It's hard to tell. He's easy to handle, but I don't know if he would be for a stranger. I don't want to make it a contest of wills. I'm thinking if Jack has his hooves trimmed, Jenny will want it too. All that is in the unknown zone. 

jenny and jack back home

In late morning I decided to move the donkeys back to their home meadow. It was the easiest transfer yet. I opened the gate, Jenny stepped out of the gate and went after the bucket of grain in my hand. I stepped ahead of her, telling her we're going to the other meadow and she'll have the grain there. She walked behind me as if obedient, and Jack behind her. I walked through the gate and they followed. Took the grain to Jenny's spot first. She was happy. Took some to Jack's place, him squealing and snorting, flaring his nostrils, curling his upper lip. He was eating before I finished pouring the grain. Caterpillar was outside, sunning on a spot about four feet from the path I walked the donkeys on. They paid her no mind this time. Last time I walked them by, Caterpillar was curled up on a mound of last year's leaves. Jenny stopped to have a sniff. Caterpillar was on edge, though knowing she was safe. I've taken her to the gate to meet the donkeys a few times. She doesn't like it, but I want them to know her, smell her, identify her by scent. They know Caterpillar lives in the barn with the Ice Cream man. I was glad to see Jenny so gentle with Caterpillar, sniffing and allowing Caterpillar her space too. Her movements were slow and nonthreatening. Caterpillar was tight as a banjo string, ready to strike if Jenny's nose touched her. Jenny's head is bigger than all of Caterpillar. Jenny satisfied about the cat, she stayed with me as we proceeded successfully through the gate. This was the smoothest transfer of all.  

caterpillar blending in

A RUSSIAN FILM FESTIVAL AT HOME

vladimir mayakovsky museum

I catch myself griping in my mind about how things oughta be and what's wrong. It's like by now I know so much of what is wrong with the world we live in, I've come to a place the new wrongs are old wrongs, just reworded by a new generation. I ask self, When are you going to get it? There is no end to the wrongs. It's a subject I already have the equivalent of a PhD in, working on my post-doc. The news every hour on the hour, on the half hour, continues the daily serial of pseudo-events created for the news from an endless variety of agendas selling points of view. And I pay attention like there is something real about it. I feel like I have an idea of what is going on in the world, yet it's based in misinformation such that reality is fiction. Not only is there absence of a dividing line between the two, they have become one. All the more interesting. A few years ago, a friend said to me, "I don't know the difference between fiction and non-fiction." He wasn't talking about the news. He meant he didn't know which one never happened and which one did. I chose not to take the opening to explain, because it doesn't matter, and I don't believe fiction is false and don't believe non-fiction is true. I'm not the one to ask about distinctions having to do with the seeming of a line not there. It's good for categorizing in book stores and libraries. I had a professor of an Eastern European history course, who assigned a novel from the region studied. He was Hungarian, had been in Soviet prison six years. He and family fled Budapest, came to USA, and languished in a place with no intellectual culture, until he learned to live without it. He was a great professor in the classroom. He showed me that good fiction can illustrate history books by giving life to the time and place.  

mayakovsky museum

I'm in the beginnings of a Russian film festival by way of netflix that, thankfully, has a large variety of Russian films. Already, I've seen several of Tarkovsky's films, will see three of them again next week. His films are unforgettable. They live in my mind. Andrei Rublev is the most haunting film of my life. Four hours that seem like two. The Mirror, the most enigmatic. The Sacrifice, among the very most beautiful. Yes, Tarkovsky's next. Ran these titles to the top of the Q. Now I'm itching to see them. Three of my life's favorite films. I wanted to see Kozintsev's King Lear again, but it's no longer available. It's a powerful film, rag and bones Lear. Russian Lear. My favorite of the ones I've seen in the last couple weeks is Silent Souls, by Alexei Fedorchenko, the first one I saw in this festival. A powerful, quiet story of two men saying goodbye to the tail end of their fading traditional culture along the Volga River. The original Russian title translates, the Buntings. It would be hard to follow. Next, How I Ended the Summer, by Alexei Popogrebski, was equally fine a film, and strangely, by coincidence, both involved two men. First one, two men prepare the dead wife of one of them to be burned with a pyre of stacked wood on a riverbank on the Volga. Second one, two men at a weather station on an Arctic island as close to the pole as Trondheim, Norway. It's cold. A simple story turned complex real fast around one ignorant decision. I liked both of them so much, both beautifully made films, I felt like they were the door opening the way into my weeks and months of films from a new mind, a new world. I've read much Tolstoy and several biographies of him, my top favorite writer on earth, ever. He represents Russia now like William Faulkner represents America now. Not at all in one way, and a whole lot in another way.  

mayakovsky museum

I've watched foreign films since age 23, first opportunity. Other cultures have been of interest from my beginnings. Since childhood I've liked to know people of cultures different from mine. I've read writers from all around the globe, enjoy them as peep-holes into how people live in certain parts of the world. I keep the Atlas nearby. A clue to the location the story is taking place, I pause the film, and look in the Atlas. I like to see landscape in the film and locate it on the map. I learned in Rome that Fellini films, though they happened in Rome, prepared me for Rome not at all. I got it early that films don't represent their culture but symbolically. In a city, like Moscow, I look at the faces of people passing by, pay attention to their clothes, how they walk, look at the architecture, interiors, the roads, the vehicles, landscapes. It's my way of low budget world travel. In film, I see a representation of how people live in certain places and times, and see the places. I didn't realize until I saw a Norwegian film that St Petersburg is on a latitude with the Scandinavian cities. And Moscow is not far south of St Petersburg. It's cold up there. I've read of Moscow winters, but never connected with how far north Moscow is. I'd rather learn about Russia without the politics of television. I've already learned that Russia has ancient ethnic regions everywhere. It is not one big culture. I'm seeing that Russia is a gathering of a large number of cultures. The old ways are fading in Russia like they are fading everywhere on earth. And then there is Siberia, east of the Ural Mountains, the part that makes Russia the biggest country on earth, Asia. I want to find films in the Asian part of Russia as well as the European.  

mayakovsky museum

Today's film was the dark side, Cargo 200. At the end, script comes up that says the story actually happened in 1984. A good film. I liked the way scenes skipped around following different characters, some directly engaged, some only peripherally involved, who don't see what's going on with the ones doing the deeds. Big surprise when this creepy guy blasted somebody with a shotgun, advancing the story to a new level. A true crime story that was bad. It brought to mind the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, though not nearly so hard to watch, and not nearly so bad. I take it for a Russian version of teenage horror movies the guys like to take chicks to see. It had a criminal mind different from any I've ever heard of. The crazy man was seriously crazy and good at getting away with his deeds. I appreciated that it did not have Hollywood cheeziness about it. It was simply a story well told. And yesterday's film was Taxi Blues, which I'd seen soon after it was new in 1991. Good to see it again. I remembered almost nothing from it except a jazz saxophone player. It, too, another beautifully made film, and from a culture totally new to me. I am seeing that Russian culture, intellectual Russia, the culture of the writers and filmmakers is so uniquely itself in relation to European cultures, as I see them in film. It's like east of Finland and Poland is another world. I had no idea it was there. I feel like I'm getting some insight into the divide in Ukraine, Europe on one side, Russia on the other. Two different worlds. I thought I was aware of Russia to some degree. I see human beings living their lives, doing the best they know how in their circumstances. Some are comfortable circumstances and some are not. I'm refreshed from the start of the film festival to see that Russian movies do not always have to have a happy ending. 

frida kahlo and vladimir mayakovsky

*