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).

Express

It is already one of those days that even the birds find too hot. This morning, I walked by a poor pigeon, languishing with feathers fluffed out in the only, cloudy, puddle it could find. The ravens give menacing looks from beneath the shade of trees, beaks open, reminding me of dogs - which are nowhere to be seen.
It is the kind of day in which one seems to live despite oneself, and the old folk in the market say, "So be it!" And it is on this kind of day that the troubling questions which had been lingering in the recess of the mind like to step forward, and say, "Hi." Although they are not usually that pleasant, and one sees them lurking there, just at the entrance, and one must coax them forwards, to get the exchange over with. This is what I call expression-which, after all, means the act of pressing out. But the word could hardly better explain, at least to my mind, what is involved in expression, "the action of squeezing out."
The other day, I tried to write about holidays, but today I realised what I was really trying to say. And that thought is the one that I coaxed forwards as I came back from the market. It had been hanging around my mind all week, only to come forth on this anxious day, when even the pigeons are hiding, far from the roofs they usually strut around on.
It is no wonder I feel alone, sometimes. We all do - it is like part of the weather: sometimes hot, sometimes cold - as the old folk say, "So be it!" But what I realised today was how in many ways my past is under threat of being chopped off, like an unwanted limb. And I so long for at least some remnants of "before." I have most successfully reconnected to it  by going on holiday - seeing old friends, repeating the old pattern of having the world as my oyster.
After realising this thought, which had been lingering like an unwanted child, I understood myself better. I often struggle with understanding myself better. As if I were always being asked by someone to explain myself, to settle the account of who I am. Who is this person? I don't know. But the questions begin as a reaction to conversations with people who sound so sure of themselves; in a move of self defeat, I usually indicate I am aware of my own weaknesses or shortcomings. I then feel driven to a process where I am moved to express myself, to myself.
I realise how much courage is necessary to live a beautiful life: one must be ready to laugh and cry. However hard we try to remain indifferent by installing the air conditioner of the mind, orphan thoughts can come forth from the depths and find us. If we want to remain alive, we must be ready to feel pain - unless we want to live with ghost limbs, but even they have been known to itch, mysteriously.
And it is only in asking the question, however painful, that one can get the answer. "So be it!" These are the ways of things. But one thing I can say: unless the heat is turned on, nothing's cooking. Mobility is sometimes spurred on when the fire is lit beneath one...

Dots.

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.