The common Cat's-ear

 

Hypochaeris radicata (Common Cat's-ear). Frome, 22 June 2021.

Some quite unsatisfactory shots of that common but lovely midsummer sight, a group of Common Cat's-ear (Hypochaeris radicata). (My copy of Stace gives the English name as simply "Cat's-ear", but that means the species has exactly the same vernacular name as its genus, which doesn't seem too clever.)

An easy plant to appreciate but not an easy subject to photograph. All the leaves are at ground-level, but the flowers are hovering high above them on elevated leafless stems. You can never photograph the leaves and flowers at the same time, except from a great distance with the kind of camera I don't have. 

Hypochaeris radicata (Common Cat's-ear). Frome, 22 June 2021.

In Sweden, where Hypochaeris radicata is called "Rotfibbla", it's reasonably common in the far south but it is certainly not the "common" Cat's-ear over there. That would be Hypochaeris maculata (Spotted Cat's-ear, Sw: Slåtterfibbla), which -- contrariwise -- is very rare in the British Isles. 

Maybe that's one reason Stace sidestepped the word "Common" in the name of Hypochaeris radicata. In the British Isles it's amply justified, the species growing pretty well everywhere (markedly unlike the two other Cat's-ear species). But now that English is a world language, it might not be very sensible for botanists across the world to be saddled with a name that alludes only to distribution in this local corner of it. 

Hypochaeris radicata (Common Cat's-ear). Frome, 22 June 2021.

There are lots of other dandelion-like Asteraceae around at this time of year, and the golden-yellow flowers of Common Cat's-ear can make lovely combinations with them: for instance the introduced Orange Hawkweed (Fox-and-cubs) in towns, or the lemon-coloured Mouse-ear Hawkweed on limestone slopes. But Common Cat's-ear can also light up a sweep of grassland by itself. 

I've never quite got my head round when the various Asteraceae species close up their flowerheads. Anyway, these photos were taken at 16:00, so Hypochaeris radicata is certainly not an early closer. 

Hypochaeris radicata (Common Cat's-ear). Frome, 22 June 2021.

Hypochaeris radicata (Common Cat's-ear). Frome, 22 June 2021.

Hypochaeris radicata (Common Cat's-ear). Frome, 22 June 2021.

Hypochaeris radicata (Common Cat's-ear). Frome, 22 June 2021.

Hypochaeris radicata (Common Cat's-ear). Frome, 22 June 2021.

Benito Pérez Galdós: Fortunata and Jacinta (1886-1887)

Benito Pérez Galdós: Fortunata y Jacinta (Fortunata and Jacinta) (1886-87)  

So, some three and half years since I began it, I've finally finished reading Fortunata and Jacinta (in the brilliant translation by Agnes Moncy Gullón). 

Well yes, it's a long book. On some rough calculations that I've just done, it comes out as 15% longer than David Copperfield. Someone else wrote that it's as long as War and Peace shorn of its epilogues. 

None of Galdós' eighty-ish other novels is anything like so long. I read somewhere that Galdós was persuaded to write a long novel because of the success of Clarín's La Regenta, published a couple of years earlier. 

But this doesn't explain why it took me so long to read. There were some long gaps, maybe a couple that lasted a year or more. When I picked it up again, it was with a sense of excitement but also a sense of struggle and reluctance. It didn't take much to draw me away from it again. (I haven't quite worked out what the feeling of reluctance was about, but I know that I was troubled about disturbing my peace of mind, e.g. whenever Juanito reappeared, or approaching the inevitable end. You might not unreasonably describe Fortunata and Jacinta as a comic novel. But I was frightened of it.)

Galdós evidently didn't have the problem that would occur to the rest of us, how to fill all those pages. He just, as it were, opened the windows and let in Madrid. At the most entertaining level Fortunata and Jacinta is just an overwhelming flow of life and anecdote and detail. Everyone knows that Galdós' favourite novelists were Dickens and Balzac. But often, immersed in the grainy, lived detail of this Madrid, what I was most reminded of was Joyce's Dublin. 

I suppose the other book that comes into view is Zola's L'Assommoir (1877). That was a complete and unexampled immersion in working-class life. Fortunata y Jacinta is more centred on middle-class life, but with special reference to the lower-class heroine Fortunata. One of the book's serious themes is the contrast between middle-class values and assumptions, the often hypocritical "ways to behave" recognized by the educated, and the radically uneducated "streetwise" conceptions held by Fortunata, her patent lack of commitment to "sensible" notions, her passionate need to live, her regular bouts of cleansing self-destruction. "I am pueblo," she says at one point. No question of preferring one of these novels to the other, both masterpieces, but psychologically Galdós poses the more pertinent question for an era when our new middle-class codes and exclusions are so hotly proclaimed and assailed. 

At any rate both these novels feel more urgent to me than War and Peace (no working class) and Ulysses (no story) -- Well, I'm being contentious I know. 

*

Juanito spotted number 11 on the door of a poultry shop. It was undoubtedly the way in, he thought, stepping over feathers and crushed eggshells. He asked two women who were plucking hens and chickens, and they answered by pointing to a screen door, the entrance to the staircase to number 11. The main entrance and the shop were one and the same in that characteristic building of old Madrid. And then it dawned on Juanito why Estupiñá often turned up with feathers from different birds stuck to his boots [. . .] To the right of that lugubrious square space, in another area, a paid assassin besmirched with blood was executing the hens. He wrung their necks with the speed and cleverness that come from experience, and when he had scarcely let go one victim and turned the agonizing creature over to the pluckers, he would grab another to caress her in the same way [. . .]

Having absorbed this gruesome spectacle (the smell of the corral and the noise of fluttering wings, the pecking and clucking of so many victims), Juanito turned to the sooty, worn, famous granite staircase. [ . . .] On the next level, as Juanito went past the door to one of the rooms, he saw it was open and naturally looked in , because everything about the place greatly stirred his curiosity. He didn't expect to see anything, and he suddenly saw something that impressed him: a pretty woman, young and tall  . . .  She seemed to be spying too, moved by a curiosity similar to his, waiting to see who the devil was coming up the blasted staircase at that time of day. The girl wore a light blue scarf on her head and a large, heavy shawl over her shoulders, and the minute she saw the Dauphin [Juanito] she swelled up at him, I mean, she put her hands on her hips and raised her shoulders with that characteristic gesture that low-class women of Madrid have, filling out their shawls with a movement that reminds you of a hen ruffling her feathers and swelling out before coming down to normal size again.

Juanito didn't suffer from shyness , and when he saw the girl and observed how pretty she was and how fine her boots were, he had an urge to get closer. 

"Does Sr. Estupiñá live here?" he asked her. 

"Don Plácido? Yes, way up, on top of the top floor," the young woman answered, taking a few steps towards the door. 

And Juanito thought, "You're coming out so I can see your pretty feet. Nice boots." As he was thinking this, he noticed that the girl was taking a red mittened hand from her shawl and raising it to her mouth. Young Santa Cruz craved to treat her in a familiar way, and couldn't resist asking:

"What are you eating, sweetheart?"

"Can't you see?" she replied, showing it to him. "An egg."

"A raw egg!"

Very gracefully, the girl lifted the broken egg to her mouth for the second time and sucked it again. 

"I don't know how you can eat that raw drool," said Santa Cruz, not finding a better way to make conversation. 

"They're better raw. Want some?" she replied, offering the Dauphin what was left in the shell. 

 

(from Fortunata and Jacinta I.3.4, translated by Agnes Moncy Gullón.)

*

At No 11 Calle Cava de San Miguel lives Estupiñá, an elderly henchman of the merchant families. But they never visit him here, because he's always out and about. Only now, with him being laid up with a rheumatism, the young Juanito is despatched to pay him a visit. The building, owned by Moreno-Isla, is seven floors from its main entrance down on Calle Cava de San Miguel. Estupiñá, as a more respectable citizen, lives at the top of the building. The staircase is "famous" because Estupiñá always talks about it (as perhaps his home's only notable feature). But he himself only has to climb four floors because he has an arrangement with the shoe-shop looking out on the Plaza Mayor, which is at a much higher elevation than the street on the other side.   

Juanito, not knowing about this, enters from the Cava side -- and down there, in the excitement of that heady charged violent atmosphere, he glimpses the woman eating a raw egg who, we'll learn, is Fortunata. 

It's a crucial scene but an anomalous one. We are seeing through Juanito's eyes here, but that'll prove to be a very rare thing. We won't meet Fortunata directly again for a long time. The novel's first 100 pages are focussed on the lives of the wealthy middle-class Santa Cruz family and their circle, a devastating group portrait. 

When the outcome of this meeting is recounted it's in an excruciating way, via Jacinta's self-tormenting curiosity and the hidden resentment in Juanito's alternately guarded and boastful revelations; then his drunken guilt; then his scrambling recalibration the following day.  (Remembering those honeymoon conversations brings back to mind some of the reluctance that I felt while reading, my over-sensitivity to the novel's pain.)

Thereafter, for much of the novel we'll be seeing things -- including Juanito -- through the eyes of others, including Jacinta and especially Fortunata.

*

I've mentioned the translation, by Agnes Moncy Gullón. It could be the topic for several posts on its own. It's certainly one of those rare translations that feels like something more than a serviceable rendering. It feels like a new classic novel in the English language, like Smollett's Gil Blas or Scott Moncrieff's Remembrance of Things Past.

And like the latter, it is both relishable and deeply strange. It feels like it was flung out with the same unhesitating rapidity with which Galdós wrote the original. There's a fearlessness about it that constantly strikes sparks. Or you might say it has a certain necessary roughness, even wrongness. 

...the collectors going by ladened with money...  (pp. 85-86) 

...two pounds of Corynthian raisins for a plum cake... (p. 94). (Don't we have the word "currants"?)  

The translation is into American English, and it makes essential and often brilliant use of colloquial American resources. 

There were various types of boys. There was the type who always goes to school with his book bag, and there was the barefoot prankster who does nothing but waste time. They differed very little in their dress, and even less in their language, which was rough and had slovenly inflections.

"Hey, kid . . . looka this. I'll push ya' face in. Get what I mean . . . ?" (p. 134)

And yet to me it doesn't sound consistently American, it sounds piebald. I don't know if that's also how Galdós sounds in Spanish, but I doubt it. I suppose this is a criticism, in principle . . . but there's a cornucopia of great effects that come out of the clashing registers. 

"Doña Barbarita" was so well-known in the district that the market women fought for her business and got into brawls over who would have dibs on the illustrious customer. (p. 92))

Then caps, scads of caps placed high on racks and aligned with a stick; sheepskin jackets and .... (p. 133)

Jackets of the 1887 edition (second and fourth parts)

[Image source: Wikipedia.] 

Is there a significance to the larger font for Fortunata? As is often observed, in the novel the two women are by no means equally prominent. Jacinta is a smaller person -- I don't mean just physically. Is that fair? -- I honestly don't know. But Jacinta has her moments, especially in the early pages. 

"[...] And besides, what difference does it make to you?" "None. I'm sorry. But what a temper!" "You're the one who's mad, not me." "Well, you are spoiled!"

Nonsense like this was inconsequential; ten minutes later they had usually made up. But when she left that night, she felt like crying. Her desire to have children had never shown itself so imperiously before. Her sister had humiliated her, been angry that she loved her little nephew so much. After all, if it wasn't jealousy, what was it? If and when she had a little boy, she wouldn't let anyone so much as look at him. She went from Hileras Street to Pontejos Street in an extremely agitated state, oblivious of everyone. It was sprinkling, but she didn't remember to open her umbrella. The gas lamps in shop windows were already lit, but Jacinta, who usually stopped in on her way home to see what was new, didn't stop once. When she got to the corner of Pontejos Square and was about to cross the street and enter her house, she heard something that made her hesitate. A chill ran through her body like a knife. She came to a halt, ears perked for the murmuring sound that seemed to come from the ground, from in between the cobblestones. It was a wail, an animal's cry begging for help and protection against desertion and death. And the cry was so piercingly sharp, so cutting, that it sounded less like the voice of a living creature than the treble sound of a violin faintly played on its highest note: meeeeee . . . [...] She looked all about her and saw at last, next to the sidewalk by the square, a grate in the curb where rainwater drains into the sewer. So that was where the sounds were coming from . . . And those laments were upsetting, producing a painful flood of pity in her. All the maternal emotions of which she was capable and all the tenderness she had experienced until then in her dreams of being a mother were activated by that cry [...]

"Deogracias, that . . . that noise over there . . . go and see what it is," she said, trembling and pale. 

The doorman listened carefully, then got down on all fours, looking at his mistress with a rather wheedling, jovial expression. 

"It must be . . . Aha! It's some kittens that got thrown into the sewer."

"Kittens? Are you sure? Are you positive that they're kittens?"

 [...]

"Get them out of there!" the lady commanded, unusually authoritative. 

Deogracias got down on all fours again, rolled up one sleeve, and put his arm into the hole. Jacinta didn't detect the incredulous, almost mocking expression on his face. It was raining harder and water started running into the opening, gushing and bubbling as if it were in a frying pan, so loudly you could hardly hear the thin meeeeee-ing any more. Nevertheless, the Dauphin's wife heard it distinctly. The doorman looked up with his dullard's face as if to invoke the heavens and, smiling, said:

"I can't, Miss. They're deep down . . . really deep down."

"Can't you take up this paving stone?" she said, stamping on it. 

"Paving stone?" Deogracias repeated, standing up and looking at his mistress as one looks at someone whose sanity is in doubt. "As for taking it up, yes, it could be done. You could notify city hall. The lieutenant mayor, Sr. Aparisi, is a neighbor. But --"

They both perked up their ears. 

"Can't hear anything any more," Deogracias commented stubbornly. "They're drowned."

The brute never suspected that he was driving a dagger into his mistress' back with those words. Jacinta, however, thought she could hear the wailing deep down. But this couldn't go on. She began to realize what a lack of proportion there was between the vastness of her pity and the smallness of its object. The rain came driving down, and by now the opening was swallowing a thick wave that made a gargling noise as it hit the walls of that gullet. Jacinta broke into a run towards the house and dashed up the stairs. [...] And all night long she suffered the ineffable annoyance of constantly hearing that meeeeee from the sewer opening. She knew it was nonsense, perhaps a nervous disorder, but she couldn't help it. [...]

(from Fortunata y Jacinta, I.6.4 (pp. 89-91 in Gullón's translation))

*

Reader: I am a novelist myself, and an avid fan of novels; this particular one taught me the glorious scope and the exhilarating freedom that a novel can provide, both as an art form to practice and as a reading experience to enjoy. You live in it. You move into it. You inhabit it. You get accustomed to it. It becomes part of the daily setting of your life, like your coffee mug or your computer or your dog. You scrape some extra minute to get back to it. You stay awake longer than you should to reach the end of a chapter. You walk the same streets the characters walk, overhear their conversations, visit the same cafés and street markets and bourgeois mansions and working-class slums and taverns. 

(Antonio Muñoz Molina, in his note "To be placed inside a copy of Fortunata and Jacinta. . .")

*

Linda Willem, "Moreno-Isla's Unpublished Scene from the 'Fortunata y Jacinta' Galleys", Anales Galdosianos 27-28 (1992-93), pp. 179-83:

https://www.academia.edu/48345034/Moreno_Islas_Unpublished_Scene_from_the_Fortunata_y_Jacinta_Galleys

A short scene that Galdós changed his mind about, replacing it with a single sentence (IV.2.5, p. 683 in this translation), tightening up the irony in Moreno's final hours. 

Staircases are important in Fortunata and Jacinta. In hindsight there's something of an irony in the seven-floor one at the Cava being owned by Moreno-Isla, whose heart trouble makes every stair-climb a crisis. 

*

Robert Kirsner, "Galdós's Attitude towards Spain as Seen in the Characters of Fortunata y Jacinta", PMLA vol 66 no 2 (March 1951), pp. 124-137. 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/459594

Kirsner argues that in Fortunata y Jacinta Galdós here manifests an acceptance of Spain as it is, with an accent on compassion, in contrast to the more radical gestures of earlier books. "... Spain appears as a living image which, like the characters of this novel, inspires a sympathetic appreciation".

There's a lot that's worth pondering here, but it's a reading that surely underemphasizes the novel's devastating challenge to Spain's new "mesocracy" (government by the middle class). (Has Kirsner forgotten, for instance, the arranged marriage. . . Surely he isn't confused by the protean narrator's assurances that all is joy and happiness?)

That protean narrator needs to be carefully negotiated. For example, in the long passage I quoted earlier, is Deogracias really a "brute", or is the epithet to be understood as a rendering of Jacinta's emotion, or a rendering of how some sympathetic member of her own class would tell the story? 

This narrator, on a larger scale, gives us small essays that we may simply swallow if we're not careful. Here's one: 

Being a rich and terribly respectable family, the Santa Cruzes were very well connected and had friends in all spheres, from the highest to the lowest. It's strange to see how our times, which are unfortunate in other ways, present us with a happy confusion of social classes or, rather, their harmony and reconciliation. In this respect our country is ahead of others, where serious historical suits for equality are awaiting a verdict. The problem has been solved here simply and peacefully, thanks to the democratic spirit of Spaniards and our less vehement concern about aristocratic status. A huge national defect, "employomania", has also had its part in this great conquest. Offices have become the trunk onto which historical branches have been grafted, and from these branches friendships have sprung up between the fallen nobleman and the plebian swollen with a university degree, and such friendships have led to blood relations. This confusion is good. Thanks to its existence, we aren't terrified of being affected by class wars; we already have a mild, inoffensive sort of socialism in our blood. Imperceptibly, and aided by bureaucracy, poverty, and education, all classes have gradually mixed; the members of one migrate to another, making a strong network that holds together and toughens the national fabric. Birth means nothing to us, and comments on ancestral lineage are only conversation. There are no differences other than the essential ones based on good versus bad breeding, on stupidity versus discretion, on the spiritual inequalities that are as old as the soul itself. The other positive class distinction, money, is based on economic principles as immutable as the laws of physics, and trying to alter them would be like trying to swallow the sea.

(from Fortunata and Jacinta I.6.1, pp. 81-82 in Gullón's translation)

I am sure this is not mere sarcasm, it isn't merely counterfactual. But I have a very strong sense of the narrator temporarily assuming the mental outlook of, say, Don Baldomero (Juanito's father). It sounds like a blandly optimistic view of society that emerges from within the middle class outlook; but what the novel is really probing is the middle class outlook itself. 

And by the end of the passage, it's started to undercut much of its original proposition by a series of shrugged-off yet increasingly significant qualifications. 

As in most novels, as in life generally, we need to keep an eye on what people actually do. Listen to Jacinta's dismissive ideas about the lower class -- eagerly fortified by Juanito, who is striving to put a lid on the past. Or the uncomprehending disparity between the outlooks of Jacinta and the doorman Deogracias in the kitten scene. 

Yes, Fortunata and Jacinta portrays class distinction with all its old inveteracy, though perhaps with new hypocrisy. To see the chasms in the above divagation there's no need to reflect on what would happen in Spain half a century later. 

The jacket illustration is a detail of an 1892 painting by the Catalan artist Ramón Casas i Carbó. According to the rear note it's called Chica in a Bar but the translator calls it La Madeleine and Casas' original title is Madeleine o Au Moulin De La Galette. So the subject who so strikingly stands in for Fortunata is in fact a Parisian. (According to the blog of the Museu Nacional the source of her emotion can be glimpsed in the mirror behind her, a couple dancing cheek to cheek. I can't really make this out. I can see what might be a couple, though they don't appear to me to be cheek to cheek.) 

I think the jacket works brilliantly, but in fact it makes me reflect that in the novel Fortunata doesn't really go to places like cafés.  Hers is a world of stairs and balconies and streets and markets and shops. The novel's many Madrid bar-café tertulias are generally peopled only by men. 

*

Two earlier posts about Fortunata and Jacinta:

Inside the Micaelas with Fortunata:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2018/02/inside-micaelas-with-fortunata.html

Wamba, King of the Visigoths:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2018/04/wamba-king-of-visigoths.html

The Swedish calendar

I got up for a wee, and there was already -- could it be? -- Yes, just the faintest light outside, a blue above the roofs of the estate. Back in my room, I looked at the phone: coming up to 0410.

  Sommarsolståndet. 

Well, just about. It is June 20 today. 

I had been glancing through my Swedish "weather calendar". 

Sommarståndsregn är vanligen långvariga.

Rain on midsummer day is usually long-lasting.

But if there's sunshine today it means Christmas Day will be very cold (clear skies). That's because they are dagbröder ("brother days") and have the same weather as each other.  (But the weather on Christmas Day foretells the weather in January; the 26th December foretells February; and so on through the twelve days of Christmas.)

Som väderlek är på midsommardag, blir den under den följande del av sommaren.

Whatever the weather does on midsummer's day, it will be like that for the rest of the summer.

"Sommarstånd" is short for "sommarsolstånd", which means (and is cognate with) "summer solstice": summer sun stand. The day the sun comes to a standstill. Now it has reached its frontier of early light. It stands there reflecting, perhaps, on what it sees. And then, very slowly, it starts to wander back. 

I thought of how, to get more of the magical summer light than this, I needed to head for the far north, without delay. Rise up and leave now! I took a sip of my glass of water, and went back to sleep.

*

*

The iron nights (järnnätter) are certain nights in late spring or late summer that were supposed to be particularly liable to frost, and hence a threat to crops. 

My weather calendar (Väderkalendar) specifies the 1-2 June (with the abbreviation "AC", impenetrable to me), the 6-9 June in Jämtland, the 8-10 June in Lappland, the 14-18 June in Västergötland. 

And then 9-12 August (Västmanland). 11 August (Hälsingland). 11-13 August (Jämtland) -- but if there's no frost on those nights, then one can be confident there'll be none until the 24th. More pessimistically, 17-28 August (Västergötland)

Wikipedia says the name for these proverbially risky nights may have arisen originally from a mistranslation of German Eismän (ice men) as Eisenmän (iron men). [The men in question being saints of specific days.]

*

The originally German 1508 book called Bondepraktikan in its Swedish version (1662) was, along with the bible, catechism and psalms, the basic reading matter of ordinary Swedish people until the end of the 19th century. It went through about 50 editions, the lore unaffected, I think, by the eleven-day shift in 1753 when switching from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian one. 

As a result of that book, further accreted with local lore, nearly every day in Sweden was a St Swithins day in someone's eyes, its weather a sign or having some proverbial application. 

*

Some of this lore was practical. No doubt it's sensible for Norrbotten coastlanders to be cautious about planting their potatoes before the end of the "iron nights" (8 June in their reckoning). 

But what was the point in remarking, e.g. on 20 June, "Sunshine today means a cold Christmas"? There must have been a social function, perhaps a sense of security or community-forming arising from a shared and sharable hoard of not-really-facts. 

*

It was via Germany, too, that the name's day tradition came to Nordic lands. It's still usual to include the names of the day in modern Swedish calendars, though I don't know how many modern Swedes make anything of it. In my own family, my mother Eva's name's day happened to fall on Christmas Eve and this was an annual talking point. Because it was such a special day for other reasons, we were more apt to remember and sometimes there was a child's drawing or an extra hug "because it's your name's day". But this was exceptional. We children might have looked up when our own name's days fell, out of curiosity, but that was as far as it went. My name's day is September 29th (the name's day being usually the same as the eponymous saint's day, when there is one). But sixty-two September 29ths have come and gone without me once thinking "Oh, it's my name's day today!" 

January 5: Hanna, Hannele. Trettondagsafton. A thirteenth-thaw is as good as 100 loads of hay (Dalarna). [January 5th is the twelfth day of Christmas and thus "Thirteenth Night" (Trettondagsafton).]

January 6: Kasper, Melker, Baltsar. Trettondedag. A thirteenth-day-thaw means a bad summer and sour hay (Skåne). A snowstorm today means thirteen snowstorms this winter. A thirteenth-day thaw is better than 20 loads of hay.  

January 13: Knut. Tjugondedag. If it's chilly from Yule to Knut, so shall it be the whole winter out. The twenty-day conifer-needles lie in the middle of the snow (Dalarna). [The twentieth day of Christmas, celebrated in Sweden by julgransplundring, stripping the Christmas tree of its decorations -- a social occasion, with visits and children's games and treats. I don't really get the last saying, but I suppose it's saying that half the snow falls before this date and half after.]

January 29: Diana. Sunshine today means a good berry year. 

A mild and wet January means a dry summer. 

If the animals are out and moving about, expect lovely cold weather. [In winter, Swedes prefer cold weather: clear skies and the brightening of the ground with snow or frost. Nobody likes the depressing darkness of a barvinter (bare winter).]

June 3: Ingemar, Gudmar. If it rains today it will rain at harvest-time.

Thunder in June means a rainy summer but a rich harvest. 

If a wet June follows a wet May, it's most likely going to be a wet summer. 

June 29 Peter, Petra. There is gold in the bottom of Petersmas rain (Medelpad) [Feast of St Peter]. If today is very warm, it will be extremely cold on Christmas Day. Final day of the year for collecting medicinal herbs. 

July 26: Jesper. If it rains today there will be a good hop harvest. 

Aftonrodnad -- klar natt, morgonrodnad -- våt hatt. (Evening red, clear night. Morning red, wet hat. )

When the black grouse lek in the autumn it's seven weeks to the first snow. 

Wole Soyinka: The Interpreters (1965)

 

'Metal on concrete jars my drink lobes'. This was Sagoe, grumbling as he stuck fingers in his ears against the mad screech of iron tables. Then his neck was nearly snapped as Dehinwa leapt up and Sagoe's head dangled in the void where her lap had been. Bandele's arms never ceased to surprise. At half-span they embraced table and chairs, pushed them deep into the main wall as dancers dodged long chameleon tongues of the cloudburst and the wind leapt at them, visibly malevolent. In a moment only the band was left.

The 'plop' continued some time before its meaning became clear to Egbo and he looked up at the leaking roof in disgust, then threw his beer into the rain muttering.

'I don't need his pity. Someone tell God not to weep in my beer.'

*

That's the arresting, some would say dismaying, opening of the novel the thirty-year-old Wole Soyinka published in 1965, The Interpreters. It did not offer to be a novel that slipped down easily. 

The scene is a nightclub (the Cambana) in Lagos. The group of young men are getting more drunk, Sagoe especially. (His girlfriend Dehinwa isn't drinking.)  They are sitting outside the main framework of the building in one of the partitioned cubicles for private groups, but the fierce rain has just started, there's a rush to move tables and chairs under the awning. Within the cubicle Bandele with his long arms is shunting their table and all the chairs at once, Dehinwa has had to leap up leaving the prone Sagoe's head unsupported. When they sit down again, Egbo's beer turns out to be right under a drip from the roof. 

The action can be extricated from the dense prose, but there's more here than the action. Egbo is already matching himself against the gods, glinting with an Ogun manner. Sagoe is already complaining in his self-centred yet fanciful and somehow not quite charmless way. 

The novel spends more time on these two characters than any of the others, yet strangely they have little to do with each other's lives, they never come into real conflict nor into real harmony. They have been friends since childhood, and in Chapter 5 we catch a glimpse of them back in Sunday School, exchanging notes about the weekly purgatives being foisted on them by Sagoe's mother. (Sagoe's troubled stomach being already a shaping concern of his young life.). 

But now, still part of the same circle of friends, they discreetly keep their distance. At one point Egbo goes into a rant to Kola and Bandele about how the past should be dead and the dead should be past: 

". . .They owe the living a duty to be forgotten quickly, usefully. Believe me, the dead should have no faces."

"You and Sagoe should get together," Kola said.

"He is a politician." 

"Meaning? You tell me what new African doesn't spew politics." 

"You see? You don't even know what I am talking about. . . ."

 (from The Interpreters, Chapter 9 (p. 120))

The novel isn't really focussed on interrelationships. Instead its characteristic image is already here on the opening page. A dazzle of physical action and activity around them, and these bright upwardly mobile returnees to a newly post-colonial Nigeria -- drunk, confused by their surroundings and confused by their personal inner conflicts. A little directionless, not knowing quite what to make of it all or what to do with their lives. 

And the "visibly malevolent" wind is an early hint at the underlying presence of the amphibious lagoon country and the Yoruba pantheon of gods who play actively yet indecipherably across the novel's experience of modern SW Nigeria. Felt as presence rather than outright protagonists. 

Here's another moment when Egbo thinks about Sagoe and tries a summation, the language buckling:

Under the heavy brood of grey, Egbo began to wonder how high the water had risen in the church of Lazarus. He remembered now that it was built on a slight rise of land, but the floods seemed ambitious enough for the main church, even for the altar several steps above the nave. A rotted half of a canoe shifting silt and slopping water reminded him of the telephone operator's voice in Sagoe's office which drove him mad -- and he was wondering what he had known, what he had seen, for he knew humanity welled in his throat like bilge-water in a black, decayed dug-out. Often he had watched Sagoe where he could sniff and unsniff emotions like a stranger . . . Sagoe, Sagoe . . . but then, weren't they all caught in a common centrifuge through the hurt of gilded abstractions, full of flies, reaching for a long time-whisk to brush away thought-smarts embedded in each sting . . .

(from Chapter 15 (p. 221).)

The Interpreters isn't always as stretchingly poetic as this, but even when it isn't you have to read carefully, because it's very swift. 

They left the club towards morning. Egbo started them up, following out the lone dancer when the singers left, and the spell shattered about her. 

'You have a rendezvous in space?' Sagoe asked. (1)

'Get lost.' (2)

'In space, certainly, what do you say, my little Secretary?' (3)

'Egbo at least is sensible. Time we all went home.' (4)

Bandele rose, 'When do you set off for Ibadan?' Sagoe asked him.

'Soon as I get up. I'm setting off before these two.' (5)

'I doubt that. Sheikh wants to get back early. But if you are ready before me, he can ride back with you.' (6)

'Anyway, if I don't see you before you go, just leave the houseboy in charge.' (7)

'You won't be back. Good-night, Dehinwa. Don't let him drive.' (8)

 

(beginning of Chapter 2 (pp. 31-32)). 

1. Sagoe to Egbo. Referring back to his comparison of the dancer's buttocks to satellites in space (Ch. 1 (p. 25)). So a suggestion of a rendezvous between the buttocks.

2. Egbo's response to Sagoe's crudity. (And he means it literally, too -- Egbo on the hunt needs to leave his friends behind.)

3. Sagoe (perhaps a bit put out by Egbo's force) makes a weakly witty allusion to the expression "lost in space". (But he surely isn't thinking of the US TV series, whose first episodes aired in 1965.) He redirects the sexual suggestion to his girlfriend Dehinwa (who works as a secretary). Dehinwa has not allowed Sagoe to have sex with her. 

4. Dehinwa's response. As often, she's the level-headed one. 

5. Bandele replying to Sagoe. Bandele is a professor at the university of Ibadan. "These two" means Kola and Sekoni. Kola teaches too (art). Kola has had their troubled friend Sekoni come to live with him. Sekoni sculpts, Kola paints. Among the group of friends, these are the three who live in Ibadan (about 80 miles from Lagos). Sagoe has invited the Ibadan trio to use his flat, hoping himself to spend the night with Dehinwa. Sagoe, Dehinwa, Egbo and Lasunwon live in Lagos, as is gradually conveyed in the squabble about sleeping arrangements that follows soon after. (Strikingly, the novel never ventures any nearer to Egbo's lodgings, nor to his work in Lagos. The Egbo of the novel is always restlessly out and about.) 

6. Kola speaking, hearing himself referred to. "Sheikh" is a nickname for Sekoni, who is of Islamic background (though he married a Christian). 

7. Sagoe speaking. A hint that he anticipates not sleeping at his own flat. Dehinwa picks up the implication, and takes him to task about it on the next page. 

8. This could be either Bandele or Kola speaking. Sounds more like Kola to me, but it's arguable. 

* 

Here's a minimal cribsheet to this easy-to-lose-your-way novel, with emphasis on the narrative events that move forward from Chapter 1 through to Chapter 18. 

Part One

Chapter 1. Lagos: The nightclub. Flashback 1: boat trip to near Egbo's grandfather's village; Egbo could be its new ruler; Egbo's indecision. Back to the nightclub scene: Kola's drawings, the lone dancer. Flashback 2: Sekoni's power station project, aborted by a corrupt inspector.

Chapter 2. Lagos. Leaving the club (Egbo heading off in pursuit of the lone dancer). Dehinwa reluctantly taking the drunk Sagoe to her own home.  Late-night scene with Dehinwa's reproving mother and aunt. 

Chapter 3. Ibadan. Presentation party at Ibadan (university). Monica Faseyi and her social-climbing husband. Kola's encounter with Monica Faseyi and Usaye. 

Chapter 4. Flashback 3 to a younger Egbo. His sexual initiation by Simi. 

Chapter 5. Lagos. A hung-over Sagoe in Dehinwa's room. Flashback 4 to Sagoe applying for a job at the "Independent Viewpoint" newspaper. Derinola, Mathias, Sagoe's Voidante philosophy. Flashback 5 to Sagoe and Egbo (and Dehinwa), when children, at their Sunday School. Flashback 4 continued: Sagoe meets Bandele and Kola for the first time since his return from the USA. Winsala and Derinola: the job offer.

Chapter 6. Flashback 4 continued: Sagoe fails to get his report on Sekoni's power station published. Voidancy continued. Flashback 6, Sekoni and his father's pilgrimage to Old Jerusalem, then forward to Ibadan where Sekoni lives with Kola: his sculpture (The Wrestler), and Kola's squabble with Joe Golder.

Chapter 7. Lagos: Sagoe's bath, walk and taxi and walk (over Carter Bridge) to Ikoyi cemetery. The two funerals.

Chapter 8. Lagos: Sagoe witnesses the flight and capture of "Barabbas" (later named Noah). Re-encounters the albino who was at the funeral. The albino's intervention to rescue "Barabbas". 

Chapter 9. Ibadan: Egbo at Bandele's. The shrine under the bridge. More memories of first night with Simi (Flashback 3). Egbo and the girl student, the mystery, they make love. 

Chapter 10. Ibadan: Sagoe at Bandele's. The infuriating Peter. The Oguazors' party. (Egbo is there too, as is Kola though he later claims otherwise (Ch. 14).)

Part Two

Chapter 11. Sekoni's death in a road accident. Lagos: At the Cambana nightclub again. The albino (Lazarus), his story of dying and returning to life, his invitation to come to his church. Kola's argument with Lasunwon.

Chapter 12. Near Lagos: Lazarus, the church service, the dedication of Noah (= "Barabbas"). Bandele's reproof to the other "interpreters", to their scepticism and exploitation. Kola wishes to paint Noah. Egbo thinking of his potential village kingdom again.

Chapter 13. Ibadan: Sagoe at Bandele's. Avoiding Peter, he meets Joe Golder who invites him back to his eighth-floor apartment. Sagoe changes his mind about staying the night there. Joe's homosexuality. Sagoe's vulgar assault on James Baldwin's Another Country. 

Chapter 14. Ibadan: Lunch at the Faseyis'. Bandele, Kola, Egbo. Mrs Faseyi. Kola's sense of betrayal. Joe Golder's modelling for Kola. 

Chapter 15. Kola's thoughts about Egbo. Flashback 7, a fight at the Mayomi club (Egbo and the thug, trussed by Bandele). Back to the present, near Lagos: Kola and Egbo lost in the rain at the lagoon, trying to re-locate the church of Lazarus. The fire. Noah panicky and trapped (we later find out that they rescue him and take him back to Ibadan). 

Chapter 16. Ibadan: Kola's almost-finished painting of the Yoruba pantheon. Egbo and Simi, Kola and Monica (they are now together). Lazarus sitting for the painting. The absent Noah. Joe Golder. 

Chapter 17. Ibadan: Egbo torn between Simi and the girl student. Bandele arriving at two in the morning; Joe Golder in the back seat. Noah is dead, he fell from the balcony in panic when Joe made advances. They go to tell Kola. Egbo's revulsion at Joe. Bandele's cover-up story to Lazarus.

Chapter 18. Ibadan: Sekoni's exhibition, with music by Joe Golder. Bandele gives Egbo the pregnant student's message. Egbo spits at Dr Lumoye. Bandele says (to the Lumoye/Oguazor group): "I hope you all live to bury your daughters".

Carter Bridge, Lagos in 1963

[Image source: https://steemit.com/history/@i0x/lagos-back-in-1963-37a0cfae6d772 .]

Page from Wole Soyinka's typescript of the poem "Idanre" (1965)

[Image source: https://www.bl.uk/west-africa/articles/the-ransome-kuti-dynasty . This annotated typescript is in the British Library. Apparently Kola's indefatigable doodling, in The Interpreters, was a habit shared with its author.]

CD cover of the Fela Ransome Kuti compilation Lagos Baby 1963-1969 mostly with his "highlife jazz" band Koola Lobitos

Fela Ransome Kuti (1938 - 1997) was Wole Soyinka's cousin. The music in the opening scene of The Interpreters is supplied first by a highlife band and then by an itinerant apala group. In Chapter 10, at the Oguazors' pretentious party,  Kola comes over to talk to Monica Faseyi and "then begin quite crazily to do a slow High Life to the ballet music playing softly from hidden speakers". 

*

Wole Soyinka is better known as a playwright and poet than as a novelist. But The Interpreters has always been guardedly attended to. Its strikingly experimental idiom, its mixture of blur and overload, sparked praise from some and unease in others about whether this was the way a truly African novel should go about things. Wasn't this modernism, and wasn't modernism intrinsically American/European? Some of that debate is captured in this piece by Nasrullah Mambrol:

https://literariness.org/2019/04/12/analysis-of-wole-soyinkas-novels/

*

Soyinka himself has always been an outspoken and independent voice. For example, he did not fully buy in to the pan-African ethos embodied in the esteemed African Writers Series (AWS), calling it "The Orange Ghetto". He saw the dangers of a self-limiting definition. Nevertheless, his own books sold in far greater volume once they were republished in the AWS.

(See this fascinating 2018 piece on the AWS by Josh MacPhee in Lapham's Quarterly:

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/judged-its-covers .)

The copy of The Interpreters I picked up last year was of course an AWS one. It contained notes by Eldred Jones as well as an indispensable glossary. (These notes seem to refer to an editor's Introduction that isn't present in this edition.)

*

As I write (June 2021), Wole Soyinka's third novel is about to be published, a mere 56 years after The Interpreters. 

When

 

Ranunculus platanifolius

This photo records one of the high points in my forty years of looking at flowers. Ranunculus platanifolius (Sw: Vitsippsranunkel) is an unusual plant of meadows in the more southerly fells of Sweden. (It also occurs in the Alps.) It doesn't really have an English name but Wikipedia calls it "Large White Buttercup". 

It wasn't an epiphanic moment at the time. I took a hasty snap of the unknown plant as I stood near a waterfall with my mum and dad, who were having an argument about our plans for the day. I took no part in the argument, but I was probably the cause of it. 

Nearly every summer I used to take a week off work and dash off to the north of Sweden to spend a few days with my mum and dad at their summer cottage in eastern Jämtland. During this precious week I was always keen for us to make a short excursion, especially to the tempting fells in the west. But as the years went by even someone as insensitive as me couldn't fail to understand that accommodating my adventurous dreams was becoming more challenging for them. 

I don't have my notebooks to hand, so I don't know exactly what year this was. I guess it was around 2009. (They gave up the cottage in 2013.) But at any rate, thanks to my note in Björn Ursing's Fältflora, I know where we were. I recorded the location as Hamra -- Anderssjöafallet. So we were in Tänndalen, in the far west of Härjedalen county, close to the Norwegian border. I think we had spent the previous night in a hot hotel room in Funäsdalen. After the argument we drove up to a little torp where we ate waffles and had a lovely walk to a little peak nearby (Ramundberget?). Then we had a long and exhausting car journey back to our cottage. We had hardly got going when we stopped to photograph a reindeer herd in a lush valley, but of course that meant we got home even later. On this journey I finally understood how absurd it was that I wasn't insured to take some of the burden of these long drives off my elderly parents. I was fifty and still behaving like their little boy. 

Anderssjöafallet

But still, for a decade or more these photos have been hanging on a photo mobile that's accompanied me on all my many moves, becoming a kind of shrine. Most of the other photos on the mobile are of loved ones (for instance, my mum and dad on the mountain stroll later the same day). But the photos portray something abstracted from all the mundane details of their specific locations and dates. A time of my life. A joy already seamed with melancholy but whole-hearted, hopeful, fertile. 

Lost on the road

 

Long-headed Poppy (Papaver dubium). Frome, 9 June 2021.

Half-awake. And in the silent darkness

the far-off sound of clanging

wagons on the quarry railway

someone picking them up and dropping them crosswise

or is it the baying of dogs in a foundry,

a dreadnought works, but where? Does it only 

plate hulls at midnight, is it so far away

that it's only now the sound can reach us? 

Or is there, far in the Mendips, an overlooked cave,

its rocky knuckles a board for the hooting of trolls?

Or is this rumbling a throat deep in the earth

accepting the daily tribute of carted dead?

Bud of Long-headed Poppy (Papaver dubium). Frome, 9 June 2021.

Lost on the road. Red daylight's

shafts on the grizzled fields

the blue seeds strewn in

the cereals' unspeaking 

ranks. What insubordination

could you expect? 

the ceaseless churning of oil

in baulked queues, the horizon

merely a mirror-wall, 

more towns more media outlets

more care homes more schooling

more authorized burning and looting

 

Flower of Long-headed Poppy (Papaver dubium). Frome, 9 June 2021.

You can rinse

you can rinse away

the innocent dust and grease

from your innocent skin

you can apply the pleasant products 

sourced from the plastic aisles

but how can you ever rinse

the grey pond within you

of its wet wipes razor blades

its fatted knots its sunken fears

the everyday hates of the DJs or the 

myths passsed on by the mythbusters

Young fruit of Long-headed Poppy (Papaver dubium). Frome, 9 June 2021.

The next day I came to the next town

I witnessed the same crowds of different people

moving around the same cafes and bars

automatic wheat and sugar, everything's OK

The still heavens and the hoarse loquacious crows

the child gangs hoeing through their acres of on-screen data

and on the benches by the river

the same drinkers, the same cursing Cassandra

Leaves and stem of Long-headed Poppy (Papaver dubium). Frome, 9 June 2021.

[Europe and North Africa. More or less throughout British Isles: sometimes considered an archaeophyte but Stace says "probably native". Fairly common in the south of Sweden, also Öland and Gotland. 

The Swedish name is Rågvallmo ("Rye Poppy"). I suppose it means that this poppy is a contaminant of rye crops. I wouldn't know: I've never seen a field of rye. In the British Isles, it's grown only in tiny quantities. Even in the great traditional rye regions running east from Germany, the total rye production has actually reduced in recent times. The reason, I suppose, is people switching their allegiance to wheat: to cakes and pizzas and croissants and biscuits and pies and pasta and all the other foods in which wheat is used as a silent thickener. Wheat's ability to meld with sugar and (especially) to spongily absorb and convey large quantities of fat into the mouth, makes it highly addictive and the perfect choice for an overweight, sedentary lifestyle.]

Sinople eye

 

Dame's Violet (Hesperis matronalis). Frome, 6 June 2021.

[A mainland European species grown in gardens for its flowers and fragrance. Often naturalized in the British Isles and in southern Sweden (Sw: Aftonviol, Trädgårdsnattviol).]

I've been reading Sarah Howe's 2015 poetry collection Loop of Jade. And, what seems to be incurred by that, doing a lot of reading round it too. These poems tend to point away from themselves, in many directions.

It's made me spend even longer than usual on Wikipedia, mugging up on e.g. vernier calipers ("Chinoiserie"), Pythagoras ("Pythagoras's Curtain"), Guandong ("Crossing from Guandong"), the Three Gorges Dam ("Yangtze"), junipers ("Night in Arizona"), exogamy and the Polanski movie Chinatown ("(h) the present classification").

Sometimes I ran across the very expression that is cast up in the poem: "neo-noir" for Polanski's film, and Pythagoras's akousmata illuminating the poem's strange word "acousmatic". Well, no surprise, Sarah Howe is an enthusiastic delver into Wikipedia herself. 

*

                                                        . . . I read

how the groom's family by Chinese tradition

should gift to her kinsmen a piglet, milk-fed . . .

when quite satisfied the bride's still intact.

I imagine your mother cranking the spit.

Crackling's coy, brittle russet then succulent fat --

that atavistic aroma make me salivate,

you physically sick. So as pet names go, Shikse's

not a bad fit. (I did play your Circean temptress . . .)

Wikipedia says it comes down from Leviticus,

how your God labelled creatures unclean to ingest . . .

This is most of the sonnet "(d) Sucking pigs"; I'd like to have quoted it all, but it's not online yet.  

I was OK on Circe and her swine because it was a story that drove a number of the Renaissance masques I wrote about recently. 

But I needed Menachem Kaiser's in-depth article "Is 'shiksa' an insult?", originally published in the L.A. Review of Books:

https://www.salon.com/2013/03/06/is_shiksa_an_insult_partner/

And I also needed Xu Bing's account of the performance piece that's mentioned towards the end of the poem:

http://www.xubing.com/en/work/details/395?classID=11&type=class

The sonnet meditates on Sarah Howe's own marriage; her Chinese background, her husband's Jewish background. 

The information about the sucking pig is decontextualized; whatever the truth of this old custom (who did it, when), it's treated here more as a fancy than a fact. The poem plays with these gobbets of "information", combining them, allowing them to be symbolic and "speak volumes",  applying them like people trying on outfits. 

And yet the effect isn't playful. Our ethnic/national self-identities are constructed by us of precisely this kind of internalized stuff, sucked gobbets welcomed as prejudicial guides to life in ways they really aren't. 

A lot of the poems in Loop of Jade grow out of a painfully diligent search for connection with an elusive heritage (Sarah grew up in Hong Kong until she was eight; her mother was Chinese but being adopted had no family). 

But in this fretting sonnet there's a disgusted glimmering of recognition about how meaningless and divisive and harmful it all is. An insight that's too reductive, an insight on which no-one can finally rest. But an insight all the same. 

*

No less so is the poem "(l) Others", at least in its final tittering. 

our future children's skeins, carded. 

"Carded" implies a homogenization, a straightening out, of the at-least-four ethnic yarns in the future children's mix. But it's also a new beginning: the poem quotes Darwin, registering the wonderment of genesis or genetics: have been, and are being, evolved. There's a defiant celebration, too, in "They wouldn't escape by the Mischlinge Laws". 

And yet this poem registers a continuing hostility, too. There are always tyrannies around. If it's not our "blood" or our "race" or our "caste", is it the determinism inherent in science's impositions, is it the tribal and public control we seem unable to outgrow? 

*

A poetic so driven by the play of information must run up against questions of truth. Back in 2013 Sarah Howe discussed this in connection with false memories she had imported into a draft poem, "Loop of Jade" (in the published version, some are changed, some half-changed, some unchanged).

In another poem here, "(e) Sirens", she discusses with the same frankness her misinterpretation of Theordore Roethke's line in "Elegy for Jane", her sidelong pickerel smile. She had always thought of "pickerel" as a fish; now she "discovers" it must have meant a wading bird all along. 

As it happens I'm perfectly sure she was right the first time. "Pickerel" as a wading bird is, as far as I can see, a purely Scottish usage that Roethke wouldn't have known or considered for a moment. The enlightened Sarah's desperate attempt to make a meaningful smile out of a dunlin's "stretched beak" is an imaginative chimera (which, not coincidentally, is the topic of the poem that follows). [That Roethke's poem mentions several other birds is neither here nor there -- yes, it could suggest that "pickerel" is also a bird, but the observation works just as well as an argument against "pickerel" meaning yet another bird.]

But anyway, Sarah's poem has already laughed off its author's pubby "research", confesses it doesn't know whether Roethke's word is fish or fowl. It's not exactly a laughing poem though. A clutch of themes about the elusiveness of truth and meaning run like a central core through the collection. The discourse of the world, its endless glibness and filtering; its information that isn't; the way that, even when we're not being lied to, we still contrive to deceive ourselves. And the temptation to silence that comes from being over-sensitized to the falsity of discourse. Well, what good is silence? 

Greater Stitchwort (Rabelera holostea). Frome, 5 June 2021.

[The above scientific name was proposed in 2019, following some phylogenetic work. Up to then Greater Stitchwort had always been Stellaria holostea. Throughout British Isles. In Sweden it's quite common in the far south, but rare elsewhere (Sw: Buskstjärnblomma).]

It thuds into my chest, this pendent

ring of milky jade --

I wear it strung on an old watch chain --

meant for a baby's bracelet. Into its

smooth circlet

I can -- just -- fit a quincunx of five

fingertips. Cool on my palm it rests --

the sinople eye

on a butterfly's wing. When I was born

she took it across to Wong Tai Sin,

my mother's mother,

to have it blessed. I saw that place --

its joss-stick incensed mist, the fortune-

casting herd,

their fluttering, tree-tied pleas -- only later

as a tourist.

(from "Loop of Jade". You can see a longer extract here.)

This extract comes from towards the end of the poem. The poet's delivery is suddenly afflicted by a striking hesitancy that recalls something it talked about earlier, her mother's hesitations. As if we've finally reached a point loquacity can't touch, where little is reliable. 

Like Roethke's "pickerel", "sinople" is a word with contradictory definitions. It's a colour word but, like the word "livid", can refer to several very different colours. The OED examples for "sinople" are about equally split between green and rusty red. Actually, that kind of works here. The loop of jade itself is I suppose green, and within its circle the shadowed palm of the hand could be a sort of ferruginous shade. For after all, it's the combination of the two that resembles the eye on a butterfly's wing: both the demarcating ring, and the contrasting colour that fills it. (E.g. a Peacock butterfly or a Mountain Apollo.)

But if you think "sinople" might also have attracted the poet by its sino- prefix I think you'd be right. (Sinopoly is in fact the name of a couple of Chinese technical companies.) Sound plays quite an important role in these poems, in their awareness of and participation in semantic leakage. Think of the sequence sick-shikse-Wikipedia in the lines I quoted earlier. 

Perhaps "quincunx" is another example of this questing looseness. It ought to mean the pattern exemplified by the five on a dice: a central spot and four corner-spots. Try as I may, I don't see that you would shape your fingertips into a quincunx pattern to fit them into a ring. The fingertips are bound to be arranged more like five petals, I reckon. 

Saxifrage, garden cultivar. Frome, 5 June 2021.

[A cultivar of hybrid origin, I imagine. The leaves and tufted habit generally resemble Tufted Saxifrage (Saxifraga cespitosa), but it has more flowers on each stem than the wild plants -- comparable in that respect to Meadow Saxifrage (Saxifraga granulata).] 

Dave Coates, in his useful post  on Loop of Jade, directed me to Sarah Howe's 2013 series of five meditative travel articles titled "To China" on the BestAmericanPoetry website; well worth reading for their own sake, and they are also (I thought) an indispensable companion to the poetry collection that followed. They're all listed here:

https://profile.typepad.com/6p0192ac7fb755970d

Martyn Crucefix on Loop of Jade:

https://martyncrucefix.com/2015/09/06/forward-first-collections-reviewed-5-sarah-howe/

Naomi on Loop of Jade:

https://thinkingjaplish.com/2018/03/18/from-shoreditch-to-shanghai-loop-of-jade-by-sarah-howe/

Rosy Garlic (Allium roseum)

 

Rosy Garlic (Allium roseum). Frome, 6 June 2021.

In Sainsbury's car-park in Frome. Rosy Garlic (Allium roseum) is a pretty arrival from the Mediterranean, now becoming quite frequent in the SW UK and along the coast of the English Channel. 

Here it's growing next to Beaked Hawk's-beard, another Mediterranean plant, along with Groundsel and Cleavers/Sticky Willy. 

The pine-scented air
Smells so good in the snow
In our toboggan we'll go
Screaming down the mountainside
The touch of your cheeks
When they're rosy and cold
Feels so cozy to hold
Just to take you close
And make you warm and

(Brian Wilson, from "Time To Get Alone")

Within my head there's a synaesthetic tug-of-war whenever I hear the name "Rosy Garlic". I can't seem to detach the word "rosy" from a sweet floral smell, from rain-rinsed cheeks or mountain toboggan runs, and re-combine it with the hot savour of garlic. 

Sometimes I wish that the plant-lovers who directly imported the French "Ail rose", or the Spanish "Ajo rosado" had translated it more literally to "Pink Garlic". 

Rosy Garlic has been cultivated at the monastery of Billom since the fourteenth century. (A small commune in the Auvergne, also the birthplace of Georges Bataille.)

In Spanish it's also known as "Ajo de culebra" (Snake Garlic); also "Ajo perro" (Dog Garlic), "Ajo de brujas" (Witch's Garlic), "Lágrimas de la Virgen" (Tears of the Virgin) . . .

As I ill-temperedly lament not being in Spain, the thought strikes me that the breath of a foreignness I'm blindly yearning is really right here in the supermarket car-park, in this exotic contemporary combination that -- all too fittingly -- garlands the word FUEL. 

Allium roseum was introduced to the British Isles as a garden plant in 1752. It was first recorded in the wild in 1837.

The plants in the photo are Allium roseum var. bulbiferum, which has bulbils as well as flowers: it seems to be the variety that's most commonly seen outside gardens. 

This species has never been recorded in Sweden, unsurprisingly.

Rosy Garlic (Allium roseum). Frome, 5 June 2021.