Pietro & Tommaso

Pietro and Tommaso were always arguing.

At dawn the squeaking of their old bicycles and the sound of their voices – Pietro’s hollow and nasal, Tommaso’s husky and sometimes hoarse - were the only noises to be heard in the empty streets. They used to cycle to work together to the factory where they worked. From the other side of the shutter slats you could still feel the sleep and darkness weighing on the rooms. The muffled ringing of alarm clocks began a sporadic dialogue from one house to the next, becoming denser in the suburbs, until finally it merged, as town merged into country, into a back and forth of cock-a-doodle-doos.

The Queen’s Necklace by Italo Calvino. Penguin. 2011

Yellow Carpet of Kowhai Flowers

Our garden kowhai is usually a late flowerer.

This year it has flowered to excess.

As have most of the flowering trees and shrubs around town - the rhododendrons have been magnificent.

Of course, as spring progresses, the florets fall - leaving a bright yellow carpet.

Filling up the very large leaves of the Chatham Island Forget-me-nots, like some overflowing wine goblet!

Muted Cello Notes

She would have liked, and did try, to keep it light, giggly, and Australian, but in spite of herself the muted ‘cello notes rose from her thicker throat, as he had heard them also in her mother. Dulcie, though, it was obvious, the matter-of-fact yet still ready-to-become-hysterical young girl, had not experienced the full agony of ‘cello music.

…

The moon was rising, however jerkily, as Dulcie began to play.
Waldo at once knew how wrong he had been to encourage her to make an exhibition of herself. Needn’t have accepted, of course, if she hadn’t wanted to. But it was going to be a heroic struggle. Not in the beginning, not in the Adagio what’s it. There she could lay the atmosphere on, and did, in almost visible slabs. Dulcie’s ever so slightly hairy arms were leaning on the solid air, first one side, then the other. Building up her defences against inevitable suicide somewhere along that road which was never moonlit enough. Her shoulders, however, were getting above themselves. If she had started humbly, the music had made her proud. It was kidding her all over again into becoming the genius she was never intended to be, dissolving the bones in her arms with a promise of release, offering a universe of passion instead of plunketty-plunk on the home upright.

Quotation from: The Solid Mandala by Patrick White.

Moss Garden Two

A veritable jungle of mosses, the bright green of a patch of a Bryum species, most likely the silvery bryum. The online NZ Enyclopedia has this to say:

Silvery bryum looks silvery because the cells of the upper third of its leaves die and lose their chlorophyll. Their skeletal remains are white and shiny, especially when dry. The dead tips act like a layer of sunscreen, protecting the still-living lower two-thirds of the leaves from damage by ultraviolet radiation. When the dead leaf tips are dampened by rain, they turn glass-like, allowing light to penetrate the moss cushion.

This patch of Bryum brightens up a a large colony of our old favourite Tortula muralis.

Pablum and Duck Milk

I, a demon, bear witness that there are no more demons left. Why demons, when man himself is a demon? Why persuade to evil someone who is already convinced? I am the last of the persuaders. I board in an attic in Tishevitz and draw my sustenance from a Yiddish storybook, a leftover from the days before the great catastrophe. The stories in the book are pablum and duck milk, but the Hebrew letters have a weight of their own. I don’t have to tell you that I am a Jew. What else, a Gentile? I’ve heard that there are Gentile demons, but I don’t know any, nor do I wish to know them. Jacob and Esau don’t become in-laws.

I came here from Lublin. Tishervitz is a godforsaken village; Adam didn’t even stop to pee there. It’s so small that a wagon goes through town and the horse is in the marketplace just as the rear wheels reach the toll gate.

The Last Demon. Isaac Bashevis Singer. Penguin 2011

Dessert, Glasses & Napery

He told it me with such a direct simplicity of conviction that I could not do otherwise than believe in him. But in the morning, in my own flat, I woke to a different atmosphere; and as I lay in bed and recalled the things he had told me, stripped of the glamour of his earnest slow voice, denuded of the focused, shaded table light, the shadowy atmosphere that wrapped about him and me, and the pleasant bright things, the dessert and glasses and napery of the dinner we had shared, making them for a time a bright little world quite cut off from everyday realities, I saw it all as frankly incredible. ‘He was mystifying!’ I said, and then: ‘How well he did it! … It isn’t quite the thing I should have expected him, of all people, to do well.’

Afterwards as I sat up in bed and sipped my morning tea, I found myself trying to account for the flavor of reality that perplexed me in this impossible reminiscences, convey – I hardly know which word to use – experiences it was otherwise impossible to tell.

H.G. Wells The Door in the Wall Penguin 2010

 

Drowning in Poetic Messages

To compose a poem that is worth reading and remembering is a gift of destiny: it happens to only a few people, without regard for rules or intentions, and to them it happens only a few times in their lives. Perhaps this is good thing; if the phenomenon were more frequent, we would be drowning in poetic messages, our own and those of others, to the detriment of us all. To Pasquale, too, it had happened only a few times, and the awareness of having a poem in his mind, ready to be caught in flight and fixed on a page like a butterfly, had always been accompanied by a curious sensation, by an aura like that which preceded epileptic fits: each time, he had heard a faint whistle in his ears, and a ticklish shiver ran through him from head to foot.

In a few moments the whistle and the shiver disappeared, and he found himself clear-headed, with the core of the poem lucid and distinct; he had only to write it down, and, lo and behold, the other lines hastened to crowd around it, obedient and strong. In a quarter of an hour the work was done: but this flash, this instantaneous process in which conception and birth succeeded one another almost like lightning and thunder, had been granted to Pasquale only five or six times in his life.

Quotation from:  The Fugitive. Primo Levi. Penguin 2011