yeT I gUess the appropriate institutiOns simplifY horseplaY

The Carousing Duck is a zimzalla object (2014 ish): even its title is more a convenience than a fact. It was made by Tim Allen, with Tom Jenks providing the stylings I suppose.

It's possible to extract a text from the bewildering object, so here are some lines. I'm not going to bother about the upper case letters (because if I did I wouldn't be able to use predictive text).

*

giggling when getting in the maze but soon gets serious
the stately home is on fire boom go the windows
however sorry for the entire orchestra is conductor only
taunt the passionless with a throat sands run through

i'll be late indeed and not because i'm ill or anything
divided the day war broke out with bystander's standards
secondary mod school duped then tooled in development
layers of beauty beneath which a witch on aspirin

i guess the water filtered through the knot on a yacht
transparent institution or just a filigree of swimmers
thinking for example of them ears that walls have
ain't a soliloquy what warps them what hear shouted out

the hearse filled with petrol while we filled with tears
days turned into the library car park quite seriously
motifs, action plans, misrepresentative commas, drift ice
the only period in history i haven't an o'level in

*

The book or object or poem has something to do with Bob Dylan's version of "Froggy went a-courtin'".


A lily-white duck came and swallowed him up, uh-huh...

*

My much longer post about Tim Allen's poetry:

http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2014/04/tim-allen-settings-etc.html

farewell to this year's cherry blossom

Early on Saturday morning, the windy edge of Storm Hannah buffeted the blossom trees. Laura lamented that all her wild cherry blossoms were gone, having maintained (for a few days) a rare overlap with the Clematis montana that grows through the tree, making a lovely contrast. Of course we forgot to photograph it.

I have mixed feelings about Housman, despite "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now", but I couldn't help thinking of these lines from another poem:

The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers
Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away....

There's one spoilt spring to scant our mortal lot,
One season ruined of your little store...

The word "spoilt" might, you feel, be better applied to the speaker. His kneejerk reaction of "ruined" is silly, I suppose, but still, who has not felt it?

Cherry blossoms are actually remarkably tenacious against wind, so long as the tree still needs them. Those that fell on Saturday morning were quite ready to fall, from the tree's point of view. It's only us observers who feel cheated of a few more days. And, tranquilly or tempestuously, the blossom season always ends.

"Tied to the Buddhist themes of mortality, mindfulness and living in the present, Japanese cherry blossoms are a timeless metaphor for human existence. Blooming season is powerful, glorious and intoxicating, but tragically short-lived — a visual reminder that our lives, too, are fleeting."

(Helen, quoted from https://notwithoutmypassport.com/cherry-blossom-meaning-in-japan/ )

Still, I was determined to squeeze the last drops, so early this morning I went to Bradford-on-Avon, remembering the uplifting glimpse of a Shôgetsu I drove past on Friday. But when I found it, I was reluctant to believe it was the same tree, so thoroughly had it been stripped. It was also much further from the pavement than I'd supposed, and none of my photos were worth keeping.

Disconsolately returning, I remembered about the young Shirofugen in the unwelcoming village of Wingfield and stopped to have a look. It was coming to the end of blossoming, but this miraculous variety keeps on unfolding new glories. So in the chilly breeze beside the fast road I felt that I could say a proper farewell to cherry-blossom.

But my best picture, maybe, was a casual snap of opening hawthorn blossom in a hedge. Nature flows and we are meant to flow with it.

Prunus 'Shirofugen'. Wingfield, 28 April 2019.

"Okay!"

The drunk across the street is in the back of the police car and the policeman is watching you. He is curious and it seems he will cross the street to meet you and you tell the man into whom you crashed about this and he is scared. "Let's pretend we're good friends saying goodnight to each other," you say, and you take up the man's hand to shake it. "Okay!" you say. This is what you imagine one good friend would say to another at three o'clock in the morning on the side of the road in Hollywood. "Okay!" you say again. "Okay!" the man says. He is crushing your hand and you are smiling. "I still think you're drunk," he whispers. You wink and return to the Toyota. The policeman has lost interest and is filling out paperwork on his dashboard; the drunk is watching you from the back of the squad car. You point to him and tip back a phantom bottle, and he nods. He points to you and tips a phantom bottle and you nod. The drunk then points skyward, toward heaven, and to his heart. This is a beautiful gesture from a man on his way to jail and as you pull back onto the road you decide to have a cry over it. You try to cry all the way home but can manage only a coughing fit and a few moans. You had hoped your crying would be so relentless that you would be forced to pull the car over and "ride it out," but you arrive home without shedding a tear. You fall asleep in the Toyota and when you wake up you are covered with sweat and your wife is hitting you and shrieking in what seems to be another language and you say to her, "Okay! Okay! Okay!" She is curious about the damage done to the front of the car and her sharpened red fingers stab crazily at the morning air.

(Patrick de Witt, Ablutions pp. 18-19.)

Patrick deWitt is a Canadian novelist who lives in Portland, Oregon. Ablutions (2009), was his first book, a pills-and-Jamesons narrative of self-destructive addictions in Hollywood. DeWitt has since written another three well-received novels, traversing different genres while retaining an undertow of comedy.

Ablutions is subtitled Notes for a novel and this accounts for the "you" (the narrator-protagonist addressing an audience of himself), the failure to mention his own name, and the various sentences beginning "Discuss.."  ("Discuss Brent the unhappy doorman.") But this suggestion of note-form isn't developed any further, and as the narrative flows along a better analogy is the "you" of a stand-up comic's anecdote, the "you" that invites the audience to identify with the typicality of the comic's experience even when its exaggerations verge on the surreal.

My own acquaintance with modern novels is so abysmally minimal that any meaningful comparisons with other books are out of the question. But the comedy and discomfort sometimes reminded me of Luke Rhinehart's The Dice Man (1972); deWitt's prose is much more consistently relishable, but he makes no attempt at an original premise of the dice-rolling type. And the L.A. location also brought to my mind Dorothy B. Hughes' noir masterpiece In A Lonely Place (1947), which is hardly a fair comparison. Yet it's interesting how both books go about inventing a style and a mind to go with it; there's a similar integrity of imagination.

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2017/03/do-you-take-chance-fan.html
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2015/02/dorothy-b-hughes-in-lonely-place-1947.html

The style of Ablutions is highly infectious. You start to speak and think like its hero (not entirely reassuring), and everywhere begins to seem like a bar at which people are talking smack. I even thought I caught the Ablutions voice now and then in the book I started on next, Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur:

Some of the kings had marvel of Merlin's words, and deemed well that it should be as he said; and some of them laughed him to scorn, as King Lot; and more others called him a witch.... 'Be we well advised to be afraid of a dream-reader?' said King Lot. 

That intrusive, dismissive voice might, admittedly, have something to do with Ablutions  containing its own prophetic Merlin, a 70-year-old chain-smoker with "desperate, deep-set gray eyes" whose "vocation is mired in the pall of alcoholic fiction".

DeWitt, an engaging interviewee, has said that he is not a political person.It had already occurred to me that Ablutions was a book that, for once, didn't keep making me think about Brexit. (Malory does, of course.)

The hero of Ablutions is unpolitical too, except when a change of scene generates inspired thoughts.

[W]hen you entered gas station number one your only idea was to purchase a phone card but your high made you dull-minded and there you were in the aisles, looking and pretending not to look at the coolers and at last giving in and purchasing the one can of beer, and later when you realized you forgot to buy a phone card you stopped at another gas station and again you forgot the phone card (you remembered the beer) but took comfort in the thought of the next gas station, and you wondered where it would be, and would the cashier be friendly or unfriendly, and you felt an uncommon patriotic shiver as you considered the country's innumerable gas stations and markets and rest stops, small businesses thriving or going under, the owners gambling their very lives on customers like yourself, travelers in need of single cans of beer and forgettable phone cards... 

That, as far as I recall, is the only time that the concept of a nation-state ("the country") flickers across his innocent mind. And in fact a European reader is likely to be struck by how very little these alcoholics have to do with the state, except sometimes in the form of law-enforcement. An uncaring society, committed to letting people go to hell in their own way; this land of the free.

"Innocent" may seem a doubtful word, given some of the hero's nastier behaviour. In fact the book shows us an identity in disintegration, which calls into question any overall definition. Still, I think "innocent" in the childlike sense covers a number of the hero's features. He has, he recognizes, a broad streak of hate, but is also apt to fall "platonically in love" and to be overwhelmed by sentimental-hysterical emotions of love and loss (they always go together). He is profoundly aware of and disgusted by the constant lies of his companions (though he lies just as compulsively as all the rest). Though it seems apparent that nothing can help him but changing his own thoughts -- so in that respect the book is an argument for personal responsibility -- there is also the blurry vision of a society that could be better than it is; kinder, more honest, less driven by its own ego-pursuits. Developed a bit further, that awareness could be the basis of a political discussion.

This book was part of a splurge at the local garden centre: four at 20p each, and two for donation-only. Books have never been more available nor less esteemed.

I've already finished the excellent short life of A.H. Clough by Rupert Christiansen -- leading to an attempt to read Clough's "Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich" on-line (the jury's still out on that one) and a renewed absorption in Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis", to a certain extent an elegy for his friend Clough.

I've also read or skimmed a lot of Hattie Ellis' Planet Chicken. This was published in 2007 and that seems a long time ago when the debate on our society and environment is evolving so rapidly; but debate is one thing and change another. The vast chicken industry no doubt remains the same horror depicted in this book. Ellis is a chef and not a vegetarian, so her book is focused on eating less but better chicken: organic, local, slow food, real meat etc. From our perspective 12 years on, the question that the book poses is more likely to be about veganism. At any rate I questioned last night's omelette (though the eggs were organic of course). But that's the wrong place to start... Most of us get most of our food while out. It's the eggs in those innocent-looking veggie breakfasts and egg-and-cress sandwiches that ought to be bothering me.

For the rest of my money, I have Helon Habila's epic of rural Nigeria to encounter, and long-overdue revisits to Malory's "booke" and to the Austen novel I know least well, in one of those lovely Everyman hardback editions.

Unending mysteries of cherry trees

Unending mysteries of cherry trees. I almost passed this one by, but then I realized it was in flower. To a certain extent. It's a healthy young tree on a trading estate in Swindon. It looks a bit like Kanzan, if you can imagine Kanzan with hardly any blossom. But Kanzan buds appear before (or alongside) the dark red new leaves, and the emerging petals are deep rose. On this tree the little red buds appear when the leaves are already green, and the emerging petals are the same light pink as the mature blossom.

Just as a reminder, here's what Kanzan usually looks like (this one was a bit further down the street).

*

An hour earlier, I came across another mystery while strolling through the abandoned Moredon Tree Collection. It isn't one of the tree catalogued on the sign -- but if you're looking for it it's not far from the Tibetan Cherry. (The white blossom you can see on the left in the picture below is a collapsed Bird Cherry).

The blossoms were a bit past it, except for a few that were growing straight out of the bole (which has rocketed skywards).

The only single pink cherry blossom that I'm familiar with is Sargent Cherry, but 25th April seems a bit late for that -- I saw others coming into flower on 20th March, and the blossom usually lasts just a couple of weeks.

On the lateral branches the blossoms all hang down: it must have looked lovely a week ago.

*

A couple of years later, I went past the same tree when it was just beginning to flower: on 25 March 2021, more or less in sync with Sargent Cherry. But it doesn't look like the Sargent Cherries I'm familiar with, because these flowers emerge from green scales and pedicels rather than deep red ones. As you can see below, the buds and opening flowers are pink but turn almost white by the time they are fully open. (As we know, they'll end up going pink again before they fall.)

Below is a (not very good) picture to try and give an impression of the height of this spindly tree. 

a very careful walk / drawing a little less

R.K. Narayan (1906 - 2001)

[Image source: https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/r-k-narayan-5285.php ] we



R. K. Narayan: "Emden"

Narayan was born in Madras (Chennai), though the setting for his fictions (“Malgudi”) is based on Mysore and Bangalore. One of my favourites is ”Emden” (the final story in Malgudi Days (1943)), a tale of extreme old age. Its hero Rao, we gather, was not an amiable man in his prime; corrupt, fearsome, and very successful. At the present time, however, he is any old man, struggling with a failing memory and winding cautiously through an existence (for his few good hours per day) whose features are invisible to those around him. Rao is so old that he no longer recognizes the names in the obituaries. A disgrace ended his career, and changed his relationship to his own past. Now he has a daily routine that involves reading a daily newspaper column on religious matters, “adequate for him to brush up his thoughts on God”, and taking a very careful walk.Though the story is full of dust and silence, time is not passing ferociously; it has stopped.

In the story his self-imposed adventure consists of a futile search for a place where, half a century before, he behaved badly to a woman (S. in his diary). He would like to bring her some sweets (he is unable to grasp just how long ago everything is, and we know that he imagines her coming to him, still plump and jasmine-smelling, like a girlfriend abandoned “years ago” but basically unchanged). Eventually a dog scares him and he drops the jilebi; the mongrel takes them off, gratefully wagging his tail. He muses: “Who knows, S. is perhaps in this incarnation now...”

Rao’s transactions with others are, to say the least, limited. He is not sure of any names and can hardly hear. He is not interested in what they have to say, anyway; his own questions are on the edge of meaninglessness.

And then a young shop assistant came out to take his order. Rao looked down at him and asked, pointing at the cross street, “Where does it lead?”

“To the next street,” the boy said, and that somehow satisfied him. The boy asked, “What can I get you?”

“Oh, will no-one leave me alone?” Rao thought with irritation.

He is immensely alone. Nevertheless, he buys some sandalwood soap, and then he decides that S. must have smelt of sandalwood, not jasmine.

Rao, we assume, gets home. He will not remember this day, nor will anyone else. “Nevertheless” may represent our overall response to the story, though that places all the emphasis on what Rao still retains, not on what he may now have; in other words it accepts certain assumptions connected with the word “decay”. Rao still somehow registers the world – (The word “somehow” is a key one in the story, representing certain mental gaps.) He is not Alzheimered though he might be doting. Our vocabulary for these far steps is poor.

Narayan uses comedy as a highly complex illuminating instrument. Young people laugh, old people are funny. I don’t know why old people laugh so seldom, and can hardly even smile for a camera; they lose, obviously, the vanity-aspect of this display, for smiling is a communication, it is not frequently completely spontaneous. Rao’s internal commentary is sharp and spiced, but with only the ghost of humour; “nevertheless” he relishes, enjoys and becomes excited in his circumscribed way. 

I want to run jostling through the rain, and I do. If I ever find any pages that are more eloquent about those last stages of life that we may reasonably hope for without enthusiasm, and tremulously observe in others, then I’ll mention it here.

The other stories I like best are “The Evening Gift”, “Selvi” and “Lawley Road”. Like “Emden” they operate as spotlights if you let them.

*
Recommended! Maddy's compilation of biographical snippets about Narayan:
https://maddy06.blogspot.com/2007/10/rk-narayan-simple-man.html

Ashokamitran (1931 - 2017)

[Image source: https://caravanmagazine.in/reviews-essays/smokeless-emanations-ashokamitran-unvarnished-art ]

 Ashokamitran: Water (1971)

Ashokamitran (b. 1931) is a Tamil author. Tannir was serialized in 1971; it is set during the 1969 drought in Madras (Chennai). The English translation was by Lakshmi Holmström (Heinemann, 1993).

That sentence about the drought gave me some disquiet. I could also say, with no less disquiet, that it’s the story of Jamuna and her younger sister Chaya, two women in various sorts of trouble. What’s striking about Water – a sort of novella-length short story – is how it deviates from the expectations aroused by these literally true descriptions. It does not seem to be concerned with its subjects in quite the expected way – it leaves spaces, is not quite pinned down and not by a second reading either. Substantial scenes are devoted to other, unnamed characters. The author has said that he began only with an image of a girl carrying a water-pot, and that enigmatic and steady image seems to be always present, no matter what we’re reading. Water does not entirely cast itself adrift in narrative. 

Ashokamitran’s prose is plain to the point where you have to deal with it. Bhaskar Rao, Jamuna’s lover, comes to take her out. Chaya arrives soon after; she disapproves very strongly.

Jamuna handed Bhaskar Rao a cup of tea, placed another cup on the table and then went to the stove and blew it out. Chaya helped herself to a single brass chembu of water and left the room. Bhaskar Rao drew a long breath and looked intently at Jamuna. Jamuna avoided his gaze. When she caught his eye by chance after some time, he signalled to her, ‘Go on, get ready.’ Jamuna took hold of another small chembu by its narrow neck and dipped it into the water, filling it just half full. Chaya came in then, her wet hair clinging to her forehead. Jamuna went out of the room, taking her own vessel with her. Chaya immediately placed her chembu beside the buckets and left the room as well. Jamuna came back into the main room, having used her half chembu of water with extreme care, contriving to wash her hands and feet as well as her face. Bhaskar was standing up by this time, impatient, having finished his tea. When he saw Jamuna, he said softly, but with grim determination, ‘Get ready’. Jamuna wiped her face and opened her trunk. At that moment Chaya too returned to the room and began to drink the tea that Jamuna had left for her on the table.

It’s through Bhaskar, desperate to get away, that we experience the unpleasant tension that comes through these neutral-sounding stage directions. At the same time we are completely aware of Jamuna’s submissive/determined awareness of her sister, the meaning of the tea on the table (remember we share our life here just as usual, Chaya, please don’t walk out on me), the meaning of Chaya being so quickly not in the room (I wash my hands of you, my routine is not disturbed) and back in it (I have a right to be here, and you know what I think, are you mad enough to ride roughshod over me). And there’s the so-limited water, not a literary symbol of the author’s contriving, but a de facto symbol that everyone in Madras can’t help appreciating – it therefore becomes a prop in human communication. Drawing a little more, or drawing a little less, these are automatically eloquent, in fact it’s impossible not to mean something.

The scene inevitably slides downhill. Water has a good many ugly, powerful scenes like this. With only the faintest shift of emphasis Ashokamitran can also use almost the same technique to make episodes that, we decide, are funny. The later nocturnal scene when the rain is coming down, and an unnamed husband and wife wrangle about filling just one or two more containers, is like a jauntier setting of the earlier melody.

With the rain pouring off the ribs of his umbrella, he returned to his rooms. Immediately his wife asked, ‘Why couldn’t you leave this one somewhere as well?’

‘I was only able to find a place for one of the tins.’

‘It must be full by now. Go and fetch it.’

He hesitated for a moment. Then he opened his umbrella and started out again.

‘While you are about it, why don’t you take this one along as well? When you bring that tin away, you could put this one in its place.’

‘Go and get rid of it yourself.’ He flung his umbrella towards the tin. Being already open, it fell elsewhere, swaying a little.

That recalcitrance of the umbrella’s flight makes it one of a sequence of objects whose motion is hard to control. The taxi, after the driver pulls over in a street where the streetlights have failed, slipping into an open ditch :

There was a sudden strange noise. After that the car moved, as if of its own volition, still further to the left. Then it came to a standstill with a sharp grinding sound.

Or Jamuna’s mother in her dreadful bed:

He lifted Jamuna’s mother a little, standing behind her shoulders. Jamuna peeled away the sari and removed it together with the sacking. She wiped her mother’s waist and thighs. Swiftly Chaya wrapped the fresh sari around their mother. Then the older woman fell back heavily, on to the bed.

Through the spaces in the text you are still aware of the pot-carrier, clambering over walls, edging her water pot under a communal tap. 

[More gleanings from my former website: I wrote these two notes back in c. 2006.]

doorstep

Luzula campestris. Swindon, 23 April 2019.

Field Wood-rush (Luzula campestris), outside my door in Swindon.

             Human flowing
through dust. Basin of time.
Unsupportable howling. Man is

But what is woman therefore.

---

    But is it the will leading
the moments, or beauty
leading the vice
versa can also work too. But of course
it does.


When you follow the time
is all backwards, is it all or apart.
When you follow this
had to add up to itself before
its presentment.

(Emily Critchley, from Ten Thousand Things (2017)).

[Sourced from this interview with Charlotte Newman on prac crit:

http://www.praccrit.com/interviews/from-ten-thousand-things-interview-by-charlotte-newman/ ]

Luzula campestris, first stage of flowering: stigmas exserted but anthers not yet visible.

Luzula campestris, second stage of flowering: tepals open, anthers releasing pollen.

Luzula campestris, leaves with long silky hairs.

an old tune

The dipping sun behind those skinny trees,

The trees I came from just now, when I found

the hill all gone in shadow, just the one

last copper shoulder where the ridge swings round;

I ran like crazy into this plot of sun

    and fell upon my knees

in wintry tussocks, streaks of green and buff.

And that's it gone, but still the grass is dry

in this unwonted, warmed-up February,

though evening dew, night frost, come soon enough.

“All the live murmur of a summer's day”...

Indeed, one bumblebee sailed in and out

of the hedgerow's tracery; no leaves as yet,

nor flowers, except near the Meads roundabout

the ragged lines of purple crocus set

     along Great Western Way

bathe in false summer, Mediterranean spring...

the lemon mahonia in business parks,

the thin-twigged winter cherry that always marks

warm hours with a rosier smattering.

The strollers and their dogs are on the hill,

where three weeks past, on snow, toboggans ran;

the girls now pushing pushchairs, and the boys

flitting in furtive bands, from which you can

smell weed emitting, low laughter and noise.

      Everyone's here to chill,

in the last rays of a half-term afternoon;

the swings and slides full of the children's cries

and yellow alder catkins and spilled fries

on walkways, which the lights will shine on soon.

And on the tarmac autumn leaves lie flattened

by many feet, so crushed the grit shows through;

these leaves becoming spectral, mere remains

of form and fibre; though their shapes stay true

no urgency of sap burns in their veins --

         and yet this faded, patterned

carpet makes the shade of homeward glow,

so tranquil and so open is this dark.

And still, threading Shaw Ridge to Lydiard Park,

comes many a runner from the homes below,

like martins skimming past you in a lane,

just podcasts on the air, you watch them go

on swoosh heels making distance in a blink,

acting a dream of flight from life so slow

its thoughts themselves hardly aspire to think

       in any fresher strain

but bear the family and pay the bills --

while these consume and fling aside the maps,

break through the ring-roads and by dawn perhaps

stand free and shivering on the Cumnor hills?

No, runners, for they call you to your homes!

Panting on footways through the winter trees

above the pipework laid by Wales and West,

where gas from Russian tundra, Nordic seas,

flows into regulated banks, expressed

         in soft erupting flames,

hot water coming on reliably --

let's go, before the dusk raises a wind on

the gloomy terraces of Even Swindon,

we can still dive in the shower before tea.

Those pesky life cycles

Harney and Sons tea. The "silken" tea-bags (as I discovered when trying to compost them, are nylon. It's staggering to think that any producer -- especially so recently -- believed this was a good idea.

I happened across Skye Morét's life-cycle analysis for this very item, proposing a linen replacement.

 http://www.skyemoret.com/Harney-Sons-LCA

I do hope Harney and Sons are acting to replace nylon. That so-unnecessary tea canister provokes questions, too. The future of the high-end foodie gift market should be a green one.


*

The Twinings mesh teabags that are served in Costa are, I believe, made of a corn starch derivative called Soilon. I have seen claims that this will break down in a month in compost, less quickly in open air. I'm running my own experiment at the moment!

I can find no reliable info on the Teavana mesh tea bags served in Starbucks. I have noticed that nylon bags are very difficult to tear laterally while corn starch bags are quite easy to tear laterally. If that's diagnostic then the Teavana bags would seem to be corn starch.

*

Meanwhile, a more hopeful sign.

Oatly (oat drink) are now labelling their products with a carbon footprint measurement. Theirs is, of course, a low one. But I hope to see the time when all products display this information.

It's a little confusing that the measurement is expressed by weight (Kg CO2e per kilogram) when the product is sized by volume (1 litre). However, it does weigh approximately 1kg. It's also unclear if the calculation includes e.g. packaging and distribution.

It's still a good start. I now know that 7-8 cartons of Oatly is equivalent to burning a litre of petrol (2.3 kg CO2e /kg). Given that this is such a relatively clean product, it may come as a surprise that the CF is as high as that. But as Oatly point out, the food industry generates 25% of global emissions compared to 14% for transportation.

Hoarse Murmurs of the Main

Secure of Fate, while Cymon ploughs the Sea,
And steers to Candy with his conquer'd Prey,
Scarce the third Glass of measur'd Hours was run,
When like a fiery Meteor sunk the Sun,
The Promise of a Storm ;  the shifting Gales
Forsake by Fits and fill the flagging Sails :
Hoarse Murmurs of the Main from far were heard,
And Night came on, not by degrees prepar'd,
But all at once ; ....



A question that I imagine taxes many people is: "Should I bother to read Dryden's Fables?" For myself, I've put it off for forty years, but last night the book fell open at "Cymon and Iphigenia" and I became gradually entranced, not least by this thrilling presage of a storm at sea.

Dryden follows Boccaccio's story from the Decameron, so far as the events, places and names are concerned, but his poetry lights various mischievous trains that are absent from the prose. In the first part of the story (see below), Cymon is inspired by love and becomes a model gentleman. Unfortunately Iphigenia is betrothed to another, so Cymon attacks the ship in which she's being taken away and removes the bride. Then follows the storm, leading to his recapture by his Rhodian enemies and Iphigenia's restoration to her promised husband. Happily Cymon is given a second chance, when it turns out that Lysimachus, the governor of Rhodes, also wants to abduct a bride (the two women are going to be married to two Rhodian brothers at a joint ceremony). This time they are successful, Cymon kills the two brothers and all ends happily.

Boccaccio doesn't trouble to mention the women's views in the matter. But Dryden persistently foregrounds the morality, or immorality, of the story. He tells us that Iphigenia would indeed prefer to marry Cymon; on the other hand he says that Cassandra, though not disapproving of Lysimachus, loved the brother she was about to marry. He uses the term "rape", (i.e. the classical rape of e.g. the Sabine Women, meaning bride-seizure), to describe what Cymon and Lysimachus do. His heroes also debate "force": a gentlemanly accomplishment in itself, and a proof of love. The idea of rape in a modern sense lurks at the edges of the story: certainly for us, and probably for Dryden's readers too.

Without spelling it out, the narrative (like its introductory lines) responds to Collier's "A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage" (1698) -- Dryden was one of its targets. At the same time, this involves a reconsideration of cavalier gentlemanliness as being above the law; an idea, though never stated so baldly, that animates Clarendon's history and Restoration drama alike. By the time of the Fables Dryden was no longer in a position to manipulate public opinion; it must have been a kind of liberation. He didn't need to be conclusive. He certainly hadn't stopped thinking.

Lord Leighton's Cymon and Iphigenia

[Image source: Wikimedia. Leighton's 1884 painting, now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.]

"Cymon and Iphigenia" was once a popular subject for painters: invariably this means the scene, early in the story, when a cloddish Cymon (a sad disappointment to his aristocrat father) discovers and falls in love with the sleeping Iphigenia, and is consequently inspired to become a belated prodigy of gentlemanly accomplishments. The subject was a great pretext for voyeurism (along with Diana and Actaeon, The Judgement of Paris, etc).

The Eclectic Light Company has an excellent illustrated post about the artistic treatments, which I won't spoil by repeating, but I couldn't resist including Lord Leighton's painting, lit by the last glow of a red sunset while a full moon rises behind. It's just as sexy as earlier treatments, even though Leighton's Iphigenia is clothed.

I've also added a later Rubens, a disquieting heap of naked bodies (the ELC post contains Rubens' earlier painting of the same subject); and James Gillray's 1796 travesty, probably commenting on parliament's failure to ban the slave trade in that year.

Rubens/Wouters: Landscape with Cymon and Iphigenia

[Painting by Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Wouters, from the 1630s. Image source: Wikimedia.]

James Gillray's Cymon and Iphigenia

[Image source: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/351992]

Prunus 'Ichiyo'

Prunus 'Ichiyo'. Frome (beside Victoria Park), 12th April 2019.

A youngish cherry tree, planted beside new sheltered housing in Frome around 12 years ago.

It's a mid-season zakura cherry (later than 'Shirotae' and 'Tai-Haku', but earlier than 'Kanzan'). I'm fairly confident that this is Prunus 'Ichiyo'.

Though still young, this tree has grown quite tall and already has a flattened top, promising an impressive lateral spread in years to come.

The flowers are double... About 20 petals. 'Ichiyo' means "one leaf", referring to the small pistillate pseudo-leaf in the centre of some of the blossoms (though you can see this feature on other double cherries too).

The leaves struck me as particularly broad and short -- some are even obcordate -- but I haven't heard if that's a feature for which 'Ichiyo' is known.

*

New buds, on 2 April 2021.

Five years after the top photo, here's the same tree at twilight in 2024:

As you can see, I was wrong about the flat top. It's grown much taller but is still basically vase-shaped. 

Prunus 'Ichiyo' ?? in Rossiter's Road

Here's an older cherry tree in Frome (actually it's one of a pair, but there's not much left of the one behind). It's pleasant but is nothing like as spectacular as our main tree; it's smaller and has a domed shape. Nevertheless it flowers at exactly the same time and the blossom is actually pretty similar, but less vigorous: fewer flowers in a bunch, shorter stalks, and fewer petals in each flower. This could all be within tolerance for 'Ichiyo'. (Cherry tree individuals live about as long as humans and they are at least as variable, especially when of different ages.)

Blossom (Victoria Park)

Blossom (Rossiter's Road)