Green and Seasonal

Autumn is descending upon this city: suddenly, my long runs have ended in dusk, while they begin hued in gold, as if all plants and objects have become especially receptive to these last rays. As I ran around a bend yesterday, at once freed from lines of trees, the sun struck my eyes without blinding, and in the few wisps of cloud beside it, I saw a tiny rainbow.
It seems particularly intelligent or inspiring to write about the seasons, it is also to step in that river that is the past. There are Virgil's Georgics; seasons as metaphors in Ovid's Metamorphoses (e.g. the line I now relate to: "Autumn comes, when the ardour of youth has gone, ripe and mellow, between youth and age, a scattering of grey on its forehead."); Petrarch's sonnet to Laura.
British poets to address the seasons include Chaucer and Shakespeare, of course, but perhaps most significantly, James Thomson, whose The Seasons straddles the age marking perhaps the (temporary?) end of formal metaphysical, encyclopedic poetry and the beginning of something more subjective. He predates Romantics like Keats and Wordsworth.
The poem is at once located "in the tradition of idealized epic encyclopedism" for its implications of Newtonian physics, Spenserian romance, Miltonic epic, geology, but, because of its "subordination of an individualized poetic vision and the exclusion of conventional organizational mechanisms", it sought a different kind of complete knowledge (Seth Rudy, Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain, 78). The poem includes even political themes: questions of human rights, liberty on the national as well as individual level, patriotism, the historical role of Scotland, which had been unified with England during his lifetime. The book remained popular for decades, in part because booksellers were able to repackage it given its Romantic appeal by playing down the multiple levels of meaning the poem contains (Rudy, 80).
Samuel Johnson's criticism of the work, that it was lacking a clear method that would synthesize its disparate parts, seems to have been part of the reason for its continued popularity. And it is this lack of "proper arrangement" allowing ready absorption of diverse elements (ibid.) that brings us to the colour green.

And so we reach our final book of poems about seasons, The Book of the Green Man, by Ronald Johnson (via). The blurb by the publisher's reads: "Ronald Johnson described The Book of the Green Man as his 'attempt, as a brash American, to make new the traditional British long seasonal poem.' This Poundian endeavor to 'make it new' stemmed from a visit that he ... made to the UK in the autumn of 1962, in search of all things 'most rich, most glittering, most strange.'"
Perhaps more exciting, we learn that he walked the landscapes - as well as gardens and grottoes, and, most notably to me at least, Gilbert White's Selborne. White is best known for his The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, written just a few years after Thomson's death, and a model for natural historians and writers. As a bird-lover, I find his ornithological description movingly astute, and who does not love the phrase "birds of passage" - observed throughout.
Part of one of Johnson's August poems reads: "'August is by much the most mute month', yet, the air may be so strongly electric that bells may ring & sparks be discharged in their clappers: ... Gilbert White quotes from the Latin: He preferred the sounds of birds to those of men..." In these lines, similarities can be seen with Thomson: individualized poetic visions, breadth over formal unity, emphasis on eye and ear.
Scope can be seen in Johnson's lines above where he writes of White, who indeed quotes from the Latin, in Letter LVI. The passage is by French philosopher, mathematician and astronomer (connected to Kepler, Galileo, Descartes) Pierre Gassendi, whose The Life of Peiresc immortalized his patron. White identifies with Peiresc: "This curious quotation [of preferring birdsong] strikes me much by so well representing my own case ... When I hear fine music I am haunted with passages ... elegant lessons still tease my imagination, and recur irresistibly to my recollection at seasons, and even when I am desirous of thinking of more serious matters."
The British Library offers a recording of birdsong rivalling instrumental music, so we might recollect it at seasons, have our imaginations teased, and contemplate what it means to be "green" - infused with nature? But seeing that Johnson also wrote a cookbook that I'd love to get my hands on, The American Table, any lack of unity encountered while walking through, writing of, and eating greens, is at least individualized: the individual being modernity's season of man.
This post (like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) was inspired by Susannah Conway's August Break.

Magazine in background: Marie Claire Idees;

brush: misprinted type, via Pugly Pixel (we will be sad to see go).

Doubt into Yellow

Here is a photo of flowers taken two days after I bought them in the market from an old lady vendor on her little stool, whose shaky hands produced my change in notes pre-folded. There was such distillation in her existence, such premeditation and simplicity that I long to see in myself. I did not recognise the yellow flowers as snapdragons, and asked their name to learn the local appellation, "little yawners". There is a great distance between a yawn and a dragon's roar (assuming dragons roar). I found myself either roaring or yawning last week, it seems I have to watch out when people start talking about education, which I see as a craft and by no means a product. I hear I will be hired again this year, which is excellent considering that my PhD dissertation has fallen into an administrative black hole and as such is yet undefended. I need to know how how to greet what we are told to see as uncertain with the zen attitude of the surfer. I used to spend hours reading about surfers, like Laird Hamilton who was raised on waves so, naturally, I might think, sought big waves. Surfers don't tend to be big on words but to watch them is to see a difference in humanity: many take the plunge, but not with equal grace. Laird surfs effortlessly, in sprezzatura, little yawner with the force of a dragon.
There is a big wave before us; we are told it is big especially by the media. Where it is not bureaucratised, it is ruled by the relative values not of sophistication, like Feyerabend's defense of 1950's China's adoption of the Yellow Emperor's Textbook of Internal Medicine ("Acupuncture, moxibustion, pulse diagnosis have led to new insights, new methods of treatment, new problems both for the Western and for the Chinese physician"), but of musical chairs where the chair one had been sitting on may suddenly be removed in the next round, if it is the volition of the games' master to remove that particular one. Whether you are an artist, a teacher, an entrepreneur, you will hear about plenty of uncertainties.
After reading a useful post by Enbrethilel I wondered about how, frankly, we might need to be wiped out before the questionning of what a healthy mind takes for granted can begin, and the words can rally forth. Her post was specifically about education, and cites a book by John Taylor Gatto in which he identifies a problem of our age as beginning, "when the young were assigned to consume, not to produce". I will posit here that part of what it takes to create (poiesis) is doubt.
A recent NYRB article on Koons explains, "where there is no doubt, there is no art." It is doubt that reduces one to the epistemology of one's ontology. This can be explained by Taoism: I found a page that does this quite well (it gives the gist): "Certitude evolves forth to DOUBT as it answers, yet DOUBT revolves back to certitude as it QUESTIONS; hence, answer within the DOUBT, yet QUESTION within the certitude." In this equation, one is just to "realise" the extremes, flow, and potential balance.

Before the Taoist's five elements theory, symbolised in five colours (black, green, red, white, yellow), there were only the two colours of yin and yang: black and white. The "Yellow Emperor" mentioned above is not only said to be the ancestor of the Chinese, dating to the third millennium BC, but is an important deity in Taoism and it was his tribe that practiced what we take as typical Chinese medicines like acupuncture. He is also said to have helped create the first Chinese calendar and his wife was said to have discovered silk: no small discovery (need one even mention the silk road). His tribe honoured the yellow earth and Yellow River, and that colour, of the five, is that which symbolises a stabilising energy, associated with rice which grows in the yellow earth and brings stability to mankind. It is also important to feng shui, which is based on the five elements theory that roughly correspond to the cosmos.
I am focusing on yellow as it is the colour one hopefully comes to, it is the centre of the bagua, if you have ever seen that octagonal trigram template used in feng shui. It is a reminder that one is to seek the balancing force; e.g., in times of increased activity, to seek a restful attitude.
The skilled surfer does not wobble and is not too stiff. To quote a page on Taoism, "REST within the activity suggests that we will feel better in all life’s activities if we bring a RESTFUL attitude to activity, or as the Tao Te Ching puts it, blunt the sharpness; untangle the knots; soften the glare;… and so on." Such is one story of the yawning snapdragons.

Background: Marie Claire Idees; Brush: Ewansim flower grunge at DeviantART.

Brown

Yesterday, I wrote about the redeeming characteristics of grey. I think that browns fall into the same category as greys - to the extent that some colours fade to brown and grey. But today, I will explore the other side of the coin.
Many people, on visiting artifacts of bygone days, believe that they originally appeared in such drab colours (grey, brown). But ancient Greek sculpture, for example, was originally painted in extremely bright colours. The changing context of time robs objects of their distinctive characteristics, and it is easy to judge objects on their face value, without considering that one is mired in misconception. Similarly, viewing a culture whose recent time has been blurred by politics and history can make it take on drab and unappealing characteristics. Politics, like time, can discolour a subject.
Our age prides itself on multiculturalism, but I would like to ask: How much this has been achieved? I won't list particular examples here, our imagining contemplation will suffice.
So, if we come across something tarnished, might we ask: Is it really so? What has tarnished this work of art? This is what I thought of when I looked for something brown, on the final day of Poppytalk Color Week.

Elements: paper bag and doily: pugly pixel.

Grey

Grey is such an interesting colour. It can be a beautiful backdrop for other colour accents, and there is something to be said for providing a canvas for others to shine on. I consider this concept an ideal - one that  requires a level of consistent maturity. Challenging, indeed. 
Grey is also the colour that some colours fade to, and so it often gets a bad rap for precisely this reason. But in reading about one of my favourite scientists, I noted that he was described towards the end of his life as never laughing out loud, but often making witty remarks as a sparkle glimmered in his eye. I once knew a wonderful Irish man like that, who always wore perfectly shining shoes. There was nothing intimidating or unsettled about him, he was most a most hospitable soul who spent time listening and then saying uplifting things like, Do you know why angels can fly? Because they take themselves so lightly.
Grey is the art of being subdued. There is a nobility in this, but it is a quality that cannot be rushed. There is light in grey, but never enough to make one squint, it is humble enough to play second fiddle.
Does grey connote something positive to you? In any case, grey is today's Poppytalk colour!

Elements: sequins and star paper: pugly pixel;

lace: surfing ant; embroidery: minitoko;
clip art shapre: Velma's.

Orange

The other night, I was walking back from an old-timey pub where a friend and I had a glass of mulled wine over a conversation of elusive themes such as "nationalism", when I came across this zany florist's. I am not sure if those orange orbs are supposed to be floating Easter eggs, or what the arrangement is all about, but it sure caught my attention, and thus makes for today's Poppytalk Color Week post.
I have certain rather naive ideas about the world, one of which is that if a person keeps a garden, they can't be a bad person because their sensitivity has led them to cultivate plants for the mere pleasure of it. I'd also like to think that someone who has an affinity to colour and is not afraid of colour combination can't be all that bad, either. The act of perusing colour and sorting out harmonious shades proves that a person can think of things beyond themselves, in a primitive poetic act. Like the gardener, they are at least making a minimal sacrifice of their time and effort toward a certain goal.
But I know that life is rarely that simple, and that I had better keep such ideas for the children's book I hope to write one day... So for now, on a bright, orange note, I wish you all a happy, fulfilling day!

Elements: stripy paper, embroidery: mnitoko;

vintage photo frame: maybe*mej.

Yellow

The memory of yellow I try now to build, to keep me warm through winter months. Remember the sun beating down in summer? Unless we climb a mountain in winter, where we can catch the sun's strength, we will be finding new sources of warmth and vitality in the coming months, by lighting candles or sitting by a fire...

Elements: fabric strips: pugly pixel.

Time goes by, but some things stay the same. I think that even in terms of our human lives, the measure of our "advance" is so very relative. Perhaps this is why one takes solace in the simple things. In any case, these two photos represent my contribution to Poppytalk Color Week. Here's to wishing us a wonderful week filled with those infinite sun rays that are love.

  Elements: fabric strips: pugly pixel.

Meditations on a rainbow

It is an overcast day here, and now that I have called the university and found I have no major outstanding obligations, it is suddenly filled with dreams.
In recent days, I have tried to resume my dissertation reading, which can be like falling down a rabbit hole. But I embarked, and my mind is filled with facts of late 19th and early 20th century intrigue that shrouded (what some refer to as) the Balkans, and the difficulties beset upon those few figures intelligent enough to chart a course through other people's projections onto a land.
It is so complicated that I am now astonished that people with little knowledge of these facts could dare to cast judgement. There is so much hatred - but it seems to come from the unexpected sources, not where we are taught to see it. These problems are so far away from the rain that is now falling, and the shrill swallow cries.
Or are they. Today, we look back at the ancient civilizations that rested heavily on prophecies and oracles as being drunkenly misguided. We pride ourselves on our rational approach and scientific advancements, which we claim can test everything. But those oracles (such as the fascinating bimbo books) took everything into consideration - a leader's reign was connected to the weather, which was seen as a sign of his success or failure. While I am not sure that I would invariably connect the two, at least the people were looking at outward signs - signs that we have today.
What I am trying to say is that everything is connected in ways we do not always understand, and won't always understand, but I think that it is noble to make the effort to gain comprehension. This week, I learned of the documentary producers Moxie Firecracker Films who have shown the proximity of subjects that we might ordinarily reject: "It's by bringing [the characters] closer to [viewers] that we all become a little bit more human. We realize that there is not so much that separates us from them."
Some call this process empathy, others call it the ability to build a metaphor. But I think that it is the defining trait of a true creative mind - which I think we are all called on to cultivate.
When we are children, we are taught to admire the rainbow, both for its transient, delicate appearance and for sometimes representing a full spectrum of colours (which, interestingly, not all human eyes are sensitive enough to perceive). In the photo below, I captured a double rainbow, known as Alexander's band, after Alexander of Aphrodisias.
Yet for all this praise of the rainbow, we forget its lesson: to try to be receptive of all colours, and to know that they are all connected.And this is today's contribution to Poppytalk Summer Colours Week.

Elements: shipping tag and cabochon: pugly pixel;

green label: minitoko.

Where blues merge

There is some discussion over what is perceived as the colour "blue" - which becomes complex when we consider how to describe the sea, given that it is at times yellow, grey, green - absorbing within it all that is reflected upon it. Some are confused by Homer's description of the sea as being "wine dark" - was he colour blind? But as a total amateur in such matters, I'd like to ask: isn't wine sometimes blue-ish?
Colours have a way of blending in and out of each other. Rilke wrote a beautiful poem about the nuance of colour in Blue Hydrangea, and it always amazes me how colourful the poem becomes as one reads it from the black and white page:

Just like the last green in a colour pot
So are these leaves, withered and wrecked
Behind the flower umbels, which reflect
A hue of blue only, more they do not.

Reflections are tear-stained, inaccurate,
As if they were about to cease,
And like old blue notepaper sheets
They wear some yellow, grey and violet,

Washed-out like on a children's apron,
Outworn and now no more in use:
We contemplate a small life's short duration.

But suddenly some new blue seemingly is seen
In just one umbel, and we muse
Over a moving blue delighting in the green.

Translation © by Guntram Deichsel, 2003-12-03 (this translation via here)

It is beautiful to think of sailing off into a voyage of colours, so in that spirit, I shall end today's Poppytalk Colours Week post with the exclamation: Ship ahoy!

Elements: frame and tag: maybe*mej; staple: Shabby Princess.

Think Pink?

It is interesting to me how colours can be so charged with meaning that it can become hard to dissociate the word from its cultural mask. I tried just now to find the origin of the phrase think pink, it seems to have emerged after WWII as part of a drive to have women return from the (previously masculine) work positions they had assumed during the war to the kitchen. Enter Audrey Hepburn and Funny Face - with that wonderful number Think Pink (do watch it again!).
Perhaps it is not surprising that so many of us were not fans of the colour when we were young. We may have been subconsciously rebelling against what the colour stood for. What do you think?
I like pink now, and even wear it - voluntarily! But of course, I am old enough to negotiate the space around me the way I see fit. And I would like to think that this liberty is representative of this era: that women, if we are careful and smart, can blossom whichever way we like. Dorothy Parker's "Men don't make passes at women who wear glasses," becomes antiquated in a decade when some women don black-rimmed glasses for fun.
Anyway, pink is a beautiful colour, and there was once even some kind of pink decorative grass people would plant in their gardens, part of the "decorative pinks" family, which, incidentally, include some flowers once used to flavour beer or wine.
And these images conjure pictures of summertime; lawns, friendly gatherings, good times. Below is a photo to match, which I submit, again in my own way, as part of Poppytalk's Summer Colours Week.

Elements: Starbursts and frame: pugly pixel; bird icon: curbly.

The Colour White

This post is the last in a series put together in honour of spring colour week over at poppytalk.

Associations being with gwai lo (the white ghosts of Hong Kong), blank pages awaiting ideas, clouds.
What I noticed in this week of colour was how so many colours seem to overlap: where does violet end and blue begin? What is the difference between a bright silver and white?
And how can such questions be so basic, and certain questions be so evasively hard to address, like: where does caring for humanity end and the infamous path paved with good intentions begin; or, what is the difference between loving unconditionally, and loving in a self-serving way?
If colours are complex, then so is the path of our lives.

What is the function of white? It is the default Western-style wall; an eye-catching colour for clarity (often used on sign posts); the colour of cleanliness (doctors' coats)... White is the empty space, the canvas we build around. It is the colour of snow, the colour of the sky, these ephemeral phenomena, the sign post of our passing lives...

White is the reflection of reflections in a mirrored gazebo, a place where things (like Rilke's things) come to gather.

And if someday all we have done
and all that has happened to us
seems so inferior and strange,
as though there'd been no point
in taking the trouble to outgrow our first pair of shoes
just to come to this -- ... Shouldn't this
strip of yellowed lace, this tightly meshed
flowery border of lace suffice
to keep us here? Look: this at least got done.
- from Rilke's Being Human

Elements: pugly pixel .

Lavender

This was a difficult colour challenge, and has also left me short of words, so here are three things about this colour:
1. There's a cute HK movie called Lavender that I remember enjoying, despite the Love HK Film review.
2. I think that putting a few drops of lavender oil on one's pillow can be useful when one can't get to sleep.
3. Lavender is supposedly about the ability to turn inwards, and self-awareness, so supposedly activates related states such as calmness, easing of tension and healing.

Elements: pugly pixel; maybe*mej .

This post was put together in honour of spring colour week over atpoppytalk.

Pink

Just say "pink" and I'll think of Homer's "rosy-fingered dawn." It is the colour of youthful beginnings - soon to be replaced by hard work and, later, the well-earned rest of the evening. Pink is a complex colour. But as for simple colours, from ancient times, mankind has more or less viewed the basic colours the same: modern scientists say they are red, green and violet-blue. Xenophanes, the ancient philosopher who learned scientific phenomena through his observations of clouds, said:

And she whom they call Iris (the rainbow), this too is by nature a cloud.
Purple, red and greenish-yellow to behold.

In this very verse, he shockingly departed from pantheistic beliefs: Iris is no longer a messenger to the gods, linking the gods to mankind, but - gasp - a mere cloud, even if a rainbow... Meanwhile, the great breakthroughs in how we perceive our vision of colours came in the 19th century, when Helmoholtz examined the inside of the human eye. He sought paramaters of seeing that would be parallel with those of sound - and introduced the variables of hue, saturation and brightness. Incidentally, these variables are also present even in photoshop, which largely depends on computer-generated algorithms, as opposed to the colour theories dreamed up by mankind.

Today we know that the eye sees new colours through a mixture of colours and intensities. Pink is one of these colours. It is complex. Not just a tint of red, it is a mixture of red, white and magenta.

And pink, our naivete, our innocence, our unaware beginnings, is also a mixture of different elements. As Homer's rosy epithet reminds us, the word for pink used to share the root with all Indo-European languages, rosa. Apparently, the Persian word for pink is the colour of the face.

When we look into the colour pink, into the rosy-fingered dawn, do we find ourselves, setting out on adventures?

Elements: pugly pixel washi tape, minitoko doilie frame.

This post was put together in honour of spring colour week over atpoppytalk.

The Colour Yellow

Rilke would go to the Louvre to discover the particular parentage of Cezanne's colour palette. It was a time of artistic research, when fragments were wholes unto themselves, and artists would search for their inner necessity that would unify the fragments. When I wonder about why I spend so much time with image fragments, it helps to consider Rilke's words:

At bottom one seeks in everything new (country or person or thing) only an expression that helps some personal confession to greater power and maturity. All things are there in order that they may, in some sense, become pictures for us. And they do not suffer from it, for while they are expressing us more and more clearly, our souls close over them in the same measure... [things] will give me the names for those most timid devoutnesses of my nature which, since my childhood, have been longing to enter into my art!

Colours are wavelengths; they were determined a century and a half ago, "no contours but rather many vibrating transitions," hence the artist seeking the smallest basic essences, finding a thousand tasks around a single motif.

In Hinduism, yellow means willpower or achievement, yet English associations signify cowardice. I think of yellow as: the sun, light, sand. While it is true that sometimes the sun looks white, I think it is the golden associations that bring to my mind the sun when we say "yellow". Or, all the drawings of such things as a child.

It is hoped these fragmented images will lead to clarity of expression, if not now, then when the time is ripe. Incidentally, the Mayans thought yellow to represent ripeness. "Everyone must be able to find in his work the centre of his life and from there to be able to grow out in radiate form as far as he can," wrote Rilke. Like the sun. Or the star of the Archaic Torso.

Elements: pugly pixel.

This post was put together in honour of spring colour week over at poppytalk.

The Colour Green

I was having technical difficulties putting this together, and am finding that my cell phone camera is really not the way to go for close-ups. I had compiled a still life of the green things in my flat, but opted in the end to compile some photos I'd already taken.
It is very interesting to look back at photos according to colour; and also understandable why Goethe attempted to come up with a colour theory.
The ancient Greeks, before him, had assigned meaning to colours. Green symbolized victory - which is so interesting: is spring victory over winter?
I know that green crystals are viewed as calming, and that psychologists have noted the calming effects of gazing at greenery.
If my quick web search is right, the Indian chakra association with green is self-love and love for others. These are all ideas that I am happy to report on here.
May we have a good week of love and victory in what is good for ourselves and those around us! Happy week.

This post was put together in honour of spring colour week over at poppytalk.

Tape element and bunting: pugly pixel; doilie frame: minitoko.