Miny imperial

#the tower
#
#
towers, buoyant serapi

Garlands

Berenice strolled on flags
and on heavy inscriptions

Oh, heavenly. I am stood here patient enough

Have you forgiven gas attax yet?

I must feed my child
Cathy.. betrayal #

Berenice scrambled flailed

the plaster knife ran all over the surface

They mustered, unbuttoning

Sov, du lilla videung

Franco in Moscow

Language can't say what I know

They're always asking for strength

the village lives only on its surface,
courting, labouring...
its dead are forgotten

Life, an illusion

The pearl waves pouring through the flume

An afternoon dark with mustering pines

And the child ran into the barn, I panicked,
I couldn't see her I flew
and then I trod on my ankle
like a fool

I banged the cupboards
and the dust flew what a dingy night

I was life, multitudes, when I came to know this.

I rose straight up with my child held above my head, the warmth of patterned blankets descended from Government Hill and burst into floral borders is that the way you imagined it

*

yellow mint tabs, caplet abstracted, multiplication red plaza mosaic,
The figures were cultivating the green, soil plots and the cream chimneys,
generators of a low grey thudding hum across a walkway behind a temple.
The fox-form slunk into the bramble,
The fox's buoyed tail like the sock of coastal plains; no paintings near the coast,
grey and mint panels, ranks of long canted grass reflexion,
the lofted spokes energised, enervated. sink-white aloft. 

flowers from Jämtland (July 2013)

A few more photos from my stay in Jämtland last July:

Angelica sylvestris

Wild Angelica (Strätta, Angelica sylvestris). One of the most characteristic plants of Norrland.  Often, as here, flushed pink. Grey Alder in the background. 

Dianthus deltoides

Maiden Pink (Baknejlika, Dianthus deltoides). Quite common in villages, road-verges, old farmsteads, pastureland... anywhere, in short, that human beings have managed to win back from the blanket forest.  

Trichophorum alpinum

Cotton Deergrass (Ullsäv, Trichophorum alpinum, formerly known as Scirpus hudsonianus). Common in northern Sweden. Once recorded in Scotland (a bog in Angus from 1791 - c. 1813), but long extinct. An extremely beautiful sight, I thought.


This and the next two photos were taken at the boggy pools in Döda Fallet (The Dead Falls), site of the former Storforsen, a spectacular waterfall on the Indal river. Magnus Huss ("Vild Hussen") began the construction of a bypass canal in early 1796; the idea was to provide a safe channel for floating timber. But the heavy spring melt leaked into the unfinished canal and rapidly eroded the glacial subsoil, diverting the whole course of the river away from the falls and back along the route it had probably occupied prior to the last Ice Age. The lake Ragundasjön was drained in four hours, Storforsen was left high and dry. Despite a 50-foot high flood wave, no-one was killed.

Vild Hussen has become a romantic anti-hero in Jämtland mythology. In the myth as I've probably misremembered it, Vild Hussen rode ahead of the flood wave on his white stallion, crying out to the peasant farmers down-river to abandon their crofts. Nevertheless, his hubris was punished. A few years later, he rowed out on the new river, was swept away and drowned - no oars were found, either because enemies (made in the bitter disputes that accompanied the canal construction) waylaid him and removed them, or else because he deliberately took his own life.

Eriophorum angustifolium

 Common Cottongrass (Ängsull - Eriophorum angustifolium). This is one of the two really widespread cottongrass species. The other one will crop up further down this post.

Eriophorum angustifolium with Trichophorum alpinum

Polygonum vivipara

Alpine Bistort (Ormrot - Polygonum vivipara). The upper part of the inflorescence has white flowers, the lower part bulbils. This is the usual form, here growing above the earth-cellar in our garden, along with Wild Strawberry, Zigzag Clover, and Harebell. Compare it to the one I saw near the top of Åre.

Thlaspi caerulescens, fruits

These elongated fruiting heads, often flushed pale pink, were always an arresting sight on the wilder garden slopes. They were a reminder of the spring flowers that, arriving in July or August, I never got to see. These spring flowers included Hepatica and Lily-of-the-Valley (you can see its leaves in the background); and also this plant, which is Alpine Pennywort (Backskärvfrö, Thlaspi caerulescens). In this last case, however, I'd occasionally find a later flowerer, perhaps stimulated to re-bloom because of injury from scythe or strimmer.  This happened in 2013, and hence the picture below. The plant when in flower is much slighter and less eye-catching than when in fruit.

Thlaspi caerulescens (formerly known as Thlaspi alpestre, until that name was shown to be illegitimate) is a plant with a puzzling distribution. In  the UK it occurs in a few widely separated upland localities from Mendip to Rhum.  In most cases (but not all) it's associated with high levels of heavy metal pollution; for example, lead or zinc spoil-heaps. How a plant with such apparently limited seed-dispersal techniques ever arrived in these remote places is a mystery.  Anyway, it's generally supposed to be native. Elsewhere the main native populations are in mountainous central Europe: - the Alps and Carpathians. In Scandinavia its history is totally different. Here it's accepted as an introduced plant, first noticed in 1840. It has since spread widely and now grows all over Scandinavia in all sorts of environments (e.g. here on a calcareous slope in open woodland). The contrast between the unfussy vigorously-spreading alien population in Sweden and the tiny, vulnerable pockets in the UK could hardly be greater.

Thlaspi caerulescens, flowers

And now, two bellflower puzzles.

BELLFLOWER PUZZLE 1:

Campanula rotundifolia

I know these aren't great pictures, but bear with me. These are the flowers of the two most common bellflowers in this area. Above: Harebell (Blåklocka, Campanula rotundifolia). Below: Spreading Bellflower (Ängsklocka, Campanula patula). Both of them were growing in a dry roadside ditch filled with Wood Horsetail (Equisetum sylvaticum), a plant that loves the roads of Norrland so much that it usually devours them in the end.

(Spreading Bellflower is another plant with a peculiar distribution. In the UK it occurs patchily in the south with a clear centre in the Welsh Marches from Shropshire down to Monmouthshire. This is such an unusual distribution pattern that it has prompted  much discussion of whether the plant is truly native or an ancient introduction. But when you look at its global distribution it makes a lot more sense. C. patula is emphatically a continental species; its heartland is approximately Belarus/Ukraine. It evidently dislikes being near any salty sea with tides: the Baltic is OK, but it detests the North Sea, the English Channel and above all the Atlantic, so is not found in Ireland, Scotland, Norway, N. France, SE England, East Anglia, Belgium, The Netherlands, North Germany... It is much commoner in Sweden than in the UK, but in both countries it's basically a midland plant.)

Campanula patula

Anyway. the puzzle concerns the plant below, which was growing between the two others in the same roadside ditch. This is either a hybrid between the two - but this family hardly ever produce natural hybrids -or else it's a hypertrophied, six-petalled and pale blue C. patula, but I've never seen one like this before. What do you think?

Outsize Campanula patula?

Campanula glomerata, maybe

BELLFLOWER PUZZLE 2:   The picture shows a glorious patch of bellflowers at the edge of the garden, a patch that has inexorably spread during the last forty years. I think they are probably a garden variety of Clustered Bellflower (Toppklocka - Campanula glomerata), which is a popular cottage-garden plant in Sweden.

(It is also known as Byaskvaller  - "village gossip" -,  a name which is supposed to refer to its invasive patch-forming. Of course this is far too good a name to be limited to a single plant, and some people use it when talking about Himalayan Balsam (Jättebalsamin - Impatiens glandulifera).)

Anyway, my doubts about the identification concern the broad leaves and in particular the bristly stems. But I take heart from Stace, who remarks in his Flora that garden escapes of C. glomerata tend to be unusually robust and might be cultivars arising from hybridization with other species. So what do you make of this one?

Campanula glomerata (maybe) - basal leaves

Campanula glomerata (maybe) - stem

The final set of pictures were taken a few miles east of the Indal valley, in a cloudberry bog on the forested plateau back of Norrsjön.

Eriophorum vaginatum

Here's the other really widespread Cottongrass: Hare's-tail Cottongrass (Tuvull, Eriophorum vaginatum). Obviously distinguished by its single, mop-like spikelets and by its densely tufted habit.

Eriophorum vaginatum

We were here, of course, to gather "Norrland's gold". It was right at the start of the cloudberry harvest.
The plants like acid conditions and full sun, so the surface of bogs is ideal. This is the first really important forest harvest of the year, and the one for which it's worth investing in a fleet of small vehicles for casual workers to drive into the wilderness and pick berries all day and all night. (In our area the casual workers seemed to come mainly from Lithuania). Cloudberries are in high demand throughout Scandinavia but farm cultivation is still at quite a rudimentary stage and most of the crop is wild. Finland is the biggest producer, Norway the biggest buyer (high demand but not enough bogs of their own).  This harvest is followed a couple of weeks later by bilberries, and then in mid to late August by lingonberries (which for local people are the most important of all).

Rubus chamaemorus - cloudberry harvest

The dwarf shrub Cloudberry (Hjortron, Rubus chamaemorus) flowers in May/June. The berries (often only one per plant) ripen in mid-July. These were exceptionally early - 8th July 2013.

Rubus chamaemorus

Cloudberries are reddish when they're not quite ripe (above), but this is a good time to pick them - they're less likely to bruise and will soon ripen by themselves. When they're truly ripe the sepals bend away from the berry, which turns translucent and an amber colour (below). Later still the sepals reflex and the colour becomes paler still - almost cream. Soon after that they fall off the plant!

Rubus chamaemorus, ripening berry

leaves of Betula nana

Dwarf Birch (Dvärgbjörk, Betula nana), another regular component of the forest bogs.

Vaccinium oxycoccos, flowers

It's quite easy to miss, but there's another berry growing here on the sphagnum: the diminutive, trailing Cranberry (Tranbär, Vaccinium oxycoccos). Unlike the cloudberry plants it's still producing flowers. The fruit ripen very late. Here and there you can find last year's cranberries lying around, bletted by the winter and edible at a pinch. (But why would you, when you have a millionaire's dessert of fresh cloudberries to hand?)

Vaccinium oxycoccos, side view

Vaccinium oxycoccos, leaves and young fruit

Vaccinium oxycoccos, fruits of previous year

Dactylorhiza maculata

Heath Spotted-orchid (Jungfru Marie nycklar, Dactylorhiza maculata), another regular presence on these forest bogs. The large lip of the flowers, with the central lobe shorter or at any rate no longer than the side lobes, distinguishes it from Common Spotted-orchid, Dactylorhiza fuchsii, which in Sweden is considered a subspecies and shares the same popular name. 

Dactylorhiza maculata, showing spotted leaves

Dactylorhiza maculata, white variant

Hej * run today along
river - then berry
picking on bog in forest
- eaten alive by
mosquitoes - blow up
mattress went flat in
the night but still
slept log - now canasta
followed by more sleep
XXXX
Sent:
8-Jul-2013
20:51:37

Cirsium heterophyllum

And finally finally, Melancholy Thistle (Brudborste, Cirsium heterophyllum), growing beside the Indal river.

Cirsium heterophyllum

The flowers of Jämtland - Nattviol

Platanthera bifolia flowers and fruits

Pictures from a stay in East Jämtland last summer (early July 2013).

Above, Lesser Butterfly-orchid = Nattviol (Platanthera bifolia). This one is the woodland variety with longer spurs (ssp. latiflora (Drejer) Löjtnant), known in Sweden as "Skogsnattviol".  On the right of the picture above, you can see a dried-up spike from the previous year.

Nattviol means "night violet" and refers to the fragrant scent at evening, designed to appeal to moths.

Here in Jämtland it's close to the northern limit of its range, but this should not lead you into thinking that the plants are rare or sickly.  Here in the woody copse known as "Sjögrens" at the back of our old summer cottage (to which, alas, we were saying our goodbyes) there has always been this healthy colony of nattviol. Perhaps the conditions are exceptionally good, in the sheltered Indal valley, on a calcareous west-facing slope.

Nattviol is a common plant in Sweden (especially central Sweden) and much celebrated, tending to become a symbol of the mystery and melancholy in those white nights of summer.

Dofta, dofta nattviol,
sommarnatt är ljum,
ingen oro sjuder.
Och till skogens tysta rum
långt ur fjärran ljuder
vemodsensam bondfiol.

Fragrant, fragrant night-violet,
summernight warm,
no unease here.
In the wood's silent spaces,
far from commotion,
one sad and lonely peasant violin.

(Erik Grotenfelt - a Finland-Swedish poet, 1891 - 1919. This unhappy poet, novelist and children's-book author, who was an early champion of Edith Södergran, received his military training in Germany, fought for the Whites during the Finnish Civil War, ordered the execution of sixty Red Guards and at least two women at Västankvarn in May 1918, initially carried out the sentences himself  (the men, he said afterwards, were not experienced in the enforcement of judgments), and shot himself a year later.  He was later claimed by Finnish Nazis as an inspirational forerunner, which more or less terminated any lingering interest in his writings.)

Platanthera bifolia, basal leaves

Platanthera bifolia, close-up of flower (after fertilization)

Platanthera bifolia, close-up - ovary, spur, unfertilized flower

The parallel arrangement of the pollinia, well shown in the close-up above, is the clearest distinction from Greater Butterfly-orchid (Platanthera chlorantha). (They also have a different scent.) Recent molecular analysis by Bateson et al shows remarkably little difference between the DNA of the two species. Contrary to what has been sensationally reported elsewhere, Bateson and his colleagues are not suggesting that they aren't two different species, only that there's something exceptional about their relationship to each other. Perhaps they only diverged very recently.

Platanthera bifolia under juniper

Nattviol

Stumt är livets sorl och skogens röster,

daggen tillrar tyst från blad till blad,

ingen strimma rodnar än i öster -

äng i månskensbad.

Det är här i tystnaden du talar,

vita blomma, och ditt tal är doft.

Vällukt vandrar över bleka dalar

under dunkelt loft.

Allt det svårmodstunga, osägbara

i naturen strömmar från din mund.

Vita blomma, du dess tolk vill vara

denna korta stund.

Mänskobarn, som här i natten vankar,

kanske gäller talet också dig;

lägg dig ned med dina kvalda tankar

här vid daggig stig!

Ställd inför din egen levnads gåta,

dunkel väv av drömmar och begär,

göm din kind i detta gräs, det våta -

ingen ser det här. 

(Carl Snoilsky, 1841-1903 - Count, diplomat, and centre of a brilliant literary movement in Stockholm in the 1860s. A much loved and very influential poet in Sweden.)

Mute is life’s murmur and the forest’s voices,

dew drips stilly from leaf to leaf,

no red streak in the east -

a meadow in moonlight.

It’s here in the silence you speak,

you  white flower, and your speech is fragrance.

Your fragrance wanders over pale valleys

under dim sky.

All the weight of melancholy, the unsayable

in nature flows from your mouth.

White flower, you’ll be its interpreter

this short while.

Man-child, who wanders here at night,

perhaps the speech concerns  you also;

lie down with your tormented thoughts

here on the dewy path!

Blank before your own life’s  riddle,

a dim weave of dreams and desires,

hide your cheek in the grass, the wet;

here no one sees.

(quick translation based on Google Translate)

New on Intercapillary Space...

I've put up a couple of little notes on Intercapillary Space.  They are not much more than annotated links but they cover quite a lot of interesting ground (of a modern-poetry-and-poetics variety, but also taking in militancy and civil unrest, tiger economies, friendship...).

http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/some-links-that-i-liked-visiting-in.html

http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/links-of-transnational-friendship.html

Tapping World Summit 2014

Yes, it's that time of year again....

The summit starts on February 24th. Lots of free stuff but it is time-limited, so make sure you sign up before the 24th and you can get a mass of free info about how (and why) to tap. Get on there now and you can watch Nick Ortner's 30-minute chat with Wayne Dyer, which is amazing.

http://www.mytapping.com/2014-tapping-world-summit.html

As for the summit itself, I'm expecting it to be the usual format of two presentations a day, all conducted by the brilliant Jessica Ortner.

(If you don't know why you'd be at all interested in this, then EFT aka "tapping" is a simple but profound technique for changing how you do things to get through life.)

If you're bothered about how this fits with conventional medicine, check out the interview with Lissa Rankin MD:

http://outrageoushealth.weebly.com/my-blog.html

What did the summer contain?

What did the summer contain?
(16)   It wasn't only the pine-scent, wasn't only
the meadow-sides flowing like a bright flag.
         At the river you picked up a
                                              handful of
         not only red river-gravel but all
            those one-syllable words: air, & love ...
(What dumb signposts they are! We who are tired
             of kicking up & down the same old road,
well, we have left some dents on them.)
         But, what was it?
Where the grass rippled up a bank,
         where we danced a mazurka & the
                                   sun became a golden berry -
what worm of no syllables
        lay wreathed & smiling in its gut?    

William Shakespeare: King John (1595?)

Mrs Siddons on Constance, quoted in Thomas Campbell's Life of Mrs Siddons

King John is now about the least-performed of Shakespeare’s plays. I have read a review of a college production at M.I.T.; but it’s a long time since Mrs Siddons and her directors seized eagerly on the role of Constance to make a showstopping display of female loftiness.  The words used by Mrs Siddons, Mrs Jameson and others are “vehemence”, “passion” and “exquisite sensibility”. These were topics of urgent interest. The Romantic/Victorian cult of “the feminine nature” - though really depending on a belittlement of women as practical agents, as is now easily seen - permitted the relief of some acute pressure in that bizarre culture.

R. L. Smallwood’s interpretation of the play (in the New Penguin Shakespeare, 1974) turns its back on all this to emphasise the centrality of the Bastard and Hubert as, eventually, decent bystanders. This reading is humane and detailed, but it has some scarcely acknowledged difficulties. (Despite the evidence of speech prefixes, I hardly accept Hubert as identical with the citizen on the walls of Angiers. The two roles have clearly defined functions and nothing but questions seems to be gained from assimilating them.)

One difficulty is that the Bastard’s outrageous (and nearly implemented) suggestion that Angiers be levelled first and argued over later must be regarded as a sort of sarcasm. The idea is proposed with considerable energy. Another is that the Bastard is not shown as being in possession of the facts, so far as John’s death warrant on Arthur is concerned. This matters if his decisions are to be regarded as morally normative.

                                    If thou didst but consent

            To this most cruel act, do but despair...

So he says to Hubert. But John did consent, and the Bastard, not knowing this, is not really put to the test.

A better approach to this rumbustious character is via his kinship with Richard Coeur de Lion. His impatience with treaties is a military and temperamental one. He is well positioned to make deflating criticisms but he is not at all suitable as a comprehensive guide to political and national behaviour. Pugnacity is a sort of behaviour that is occasionally useful.

It is perhaps with these issues in mind that someone else has proposed playing King John as a “black comedy”, i.e. (so I suppose) a play in which all the action is to some extent vain and there is no moral centre. “Black comedy” seems to me an anachronistic genre, I mean when applied to Shakespeare; it can glide over difficulties but not help us.

What everyone admits is the linguistic exuberance. Tennyson even referred to “Aeschylean lines”, though I think this too is unhelpful if put to the question. If I was directing (this is my big-budget production on the “Infinite Culture Channel”), I would just want to play each scene for all it’s worth – no interpretation, no worrying about character consistency. This implies a reluctance to unify. The drama would be of situation, rather than character development, somewhat resembling a soap opera (for example currently, in Brookside, Jackie is pregnant and is very unhappy about it – but this has nothing to do with her “character”, which cannot be “summed up” - she represents, momentarily, any woman in that situation).

Now I have invoked a naturalistic genre; but the scenes before Angiers, in particular II.1, are choral, a development of the “Senecan” formality of Shakespeare’s first tetralogy. II.1 is an ensemble scene (all the speakers are of equal importance) with a highly patterned architecture. It’s impossible to conceive a naturalistic presentation in which all sides are simultaneously within easy earshot, for they speak out of two opposed armies and from within a besieged town. Perhaps it was this that made me concede, after I’d read the play through fast, that yes, it was an unactable kind of a play, and no wonder it wasn’t bothered with. (More likely, the real reason is that as a result of the subtle devaluation of Shakespeare over the last half-century, we now like to take our history plays in batches. To only see one of them doesn’t feel sustaining enough.)

But it’s different when you read more slowly.

            The Pyrenean and the River Po,

            It draws toward supper in conclusion so.

            With slaughter’s pencil, where revenge did paint

            The fearful difference of incensèd kings.

            Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

            Lies in his bed,

            And all the shrouds wherewith my life should sail

            Are turnèd to one thread, one little hair;

At this pace it’s ridiculous to say that “the play is not a play of character”. These are plainly the words of fully-realized speakers, and the reading experience, though its effect is in a way accidental and unintended by Shakespeare, has a depth of realization that, because we have filled its gaps and spaces, exceeds the most detailed novel. The Victorian “Complete Shakespeare” thus supplied an unattainable vision for the novelists to aim at.

If most books in the canon are now read in circumstances remote from the author’s intended purposes, Shakespeare’s is a peculiarly obvious instance. (The way we now receive classical music, on personal audio systems, is an analogy that likewise calls into question the purpose of reviving an “authentic” presentation - it isn’t the promise of an enhanced engagement.)

And wild nature itself? Is that, too, comprehended with a special intensity as a result of its streaked and slender persistence in our developed environments? To long for a return to universal wildness, as I find myself doing, is to ask for I know not what. It is to give up most of what we think of as comprehension of nature (which originates in dissection and in use) – it is to make a demand that is not for our civilisation, but for its surrender. In practice the conservationist fails to achieve more than a slight, ornamental correction. But in principle the longing is distinctly anti-humanist.

 

Mrs Siddons as Constance, detail of drawing by John Flaxman

(2002, 2014)

These notes on Shakespeare: full list