Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Aurelia aurita

The common name for the common jellyfish is 'Moon Jelly'. But this is not what their mothers call them.

Moons, in common with vampires, are associated with the night but can go out in sunlight; it just weakens them. When you see a moon hanging in the daytime sky it is so reduced it is almost transparent. If you peel such a moon away from the pale pottery blue of the firmament you will notice it is thin as a flake of laundry soap.

When these moons fall into the sea they become sodden, and then gelatinous, and then slowly they billow into bell-shapes, and are seduced by the watery element.

The three Ladies of the Moon are Selene, Diana, and Hecate. They know by now how their daughters wander, and how they fall. They let them go. In the ebb and flow of the tide, they rock their wayward babies to sleep.

When Natural Philosophy came to name the world, he put on his best embroidered slippers and stuffed his pipe with Nicotiana tabacum. The lists were long and sometimes he ascribed unworthy names. Resting his eyes he fell, perhaps, asleep. If he did sleep, in his dream he was visited by three ladies: the first was young and soft-skinned, with pale yellow hair and a round, winsome face; the second was most memorable for her collection of weapons, and the third was an old witch.

'See,' said the young one, her plump delicate finger indicating the drawing of a primitive sea-animal, 'See our precious babies. We miss them so, it is a perpetual ache. We wish to name them. It is a kind of spell, we know, what you do.'

The weaponed one said, 'Their name will feel like a soft caress.'

And the witch added, 'But at the end, there will be a little tskiness, so they know how naughty they have been.'

Then they took his quill, and wrote something in his list. They all seemed to do this, and all at the same time, as if the witch and the warrior were shadows of the girl, or as if she were light playing on their silvering hair.

Natural Philosophy awoke to a cold dark room. His candle had guttered in the wax, and the only light came from the stern eye of the moon. The list was as he had left it before dozing, but with a grateful shudder, he remembered the name.

Below his tower spread the endless, black, moon-caressed sea. And through it, gazing up at their three mothers, swam Aurelia Aurita, the Moon Jellies.

Friday, November 11, 2011

The Moth Lady

With the dusk of the year came the Lady of Moths,
When the sun beneath veils was in grieving for Day;
From out the full jaundicing moon she would creep
And like ink through clear water, death spread beneath.

She thieved all the leaves from the shivering trees;
Her fingers found dark hair and silvered the threads;
The rot-beetles down to their supper she bade;
She fashioned her songs from the groans of the dead.

Her imps poured, like treacle, black night over earth -
They stirred it with bat's cry and thunderous clouds.
And with a flick of her feet she would shoot through the sky,
And she laughed and she laughed, but she made the world cry.

Monday, September 19, 2011

Wood Dock

Wood Dock
He always says it looks like rust
and it does.
Ruffled rust, ruched rust,
rust when it's the dust
on truffles of chocolate -
the ruffles of rust-rich-dyed
petticoats.
And the vermillion red
of the half-hidden stem
is a scandalous stocking
bared.
Wood Dock is
a scruffy little hussy
dancing
at the cross of the road.

*
I'm not sure if the plant I wrote this about actually is Wood Dock. It's some kind of dock, and it has beautiful bright red stems and clumps of rich brown flowery-seedy type things (to use the technical term). The plants I've seen are fuller than any of the straggly specimens I can find online. Anyhoo, it will remain a mystery until I can find a book dedicated solely to Docks. Which will hopefully be a long long time.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

The King

Faceless Ageless was a king. He had a face, and was of some age. He was a very wise king, and to show you how wise he was, I will tell you he wore his hair and beard clipped short. In those days men were always saying to each other:
Look how long my beard is!
And then stepping on it and tripping themselves. And then the man behind would tread on the first man's hair, and a war would begin. It was all very silly, but the men liked to have their beards and their long hair. Faceless Ageless was laughed at and scorned, but he could run through a thicket without getting tangled in a bush, and he never had a sore chin from stumbling on his own beard.

Before Faceless Ageless became king he was a peasant. The queen of the realm fell in love with this strange man who could walk without tripping up, and so he went with her to her castle and became her husband.

Many people did not like to bow to one at whom they had yesterday laughed, so when the king went to meet his subjects he was pelted with rotten fruit and insults. His queen was very angry, and then she was embarrassed, but most of all she was sad. She raised her arms and all fell silent, for no one had ever laughed at the queen. She gazed at the crowds of people and deliberated in her head. And then she began.

When I came to this throne, she said, you were glad to have me. I repaid your service with money and land. I have tried to judge you fairly. You have not complained.
Now I bring you a king. We will rule together. If you find him unfair, or foolish, you may complain. But if a king does the duty of a king, what care you of his appearance? Until he is dead or deposed, he has no face but that of a king, no age but that of his reign. All queens are called the Queen; all kings are called the King. You have made it so, and we need no other identity.

The crowd was very still, and they remained so, until the royal couple went back into their castle. Whether this was because they were awed by the wisdom of their queen, or because no one understood what she said and no one wanted to admit this, we shall perhaps never know.
But so it was that ever after the king was called Faceless Ageless. He was not called 'the King' at all.

Monday, August 8, 2011

Shops with Chandeliers

I’m in a shop. Wooden counters and gleaming but spotted glass - the kind of wood on which sunlight pools, as if it likes the feel of it - and chandeliers. One chandelier is grand, nine is bizarre. Bizarre. I look down and the labelled cupboards by my right hand proffer a handle marked 'Bazaar' so I draw it open, and beckoned by the buzzing chatter without, I climb through.
Balloons sway in coloured clouds above wonder-eyed kids, and nearest me a man stands behind a tray of wrinkled-looking rocks. “Bezoars,” he tells me, smiling and gesturing to his wares. When I look away from him I am sure he is a goat. I look back. He is a goat-like person, all right: thin face, pointed beard, long horns - horns? yes, it could be the fashion here: horns - and he is wearing the kind of neat dark green coat a goat would wear, if goats wore coats.
At my right, on the door leading back to the shop, is a coat of arms. The most boring of all coats of arms: black, above white. The Power crest. My husband's arms hold an eagle, perhaps even fish. But though it is undoubtedly a better crest, I did not take it. It wasn't mine. And if the wrong crest were on that door now, would I be allowed back in?
I push it, and it opens.
What's in a name? Everything, everything. The names I've been given and the names I give myself, all are here, labelling different compartments. On a shelf I still keep the same copy of the novel I studied in school. Inside the back page, all four of my names love all four of my husband's, with the superstitious precision of a seventeen-year-old girl. I was guarding that most elusive of finds: a boy who did not believe bad moods made him more attractive. He has a shop, too, probably. But I don't know if I have a door to it.
I wheel the dial on the radio and it sputters and then Kate Bush is singing. She is out on a wiley, windy moor, rolling and falling in green. When Heathcliff has let her in the window (or not), Laurie Taylor comes on, voice like a welcoming scarf.
“In the studio with me today I have St Peter,” he begins. “Are we asleep or are we dead? How can we tell?”
Well, I think, you're an atheist, and so am I, come to that, so if we're here, this can't be the afterlife. I chew my lip. The thing is, I bought that book on Logic, but I never actually read it.
I glance around at the cupboards and drawers and doors. If I am sleeping, one of these will lead to our bed. I will open my eyes and one of us will make coffee, and we'll slowly wake up while staring out the window watching the pigeons in the trees. But if I am dead, the same thing could happen but you wouldn't be real. And I might not even know. Or I might know.
I look again at the doors. And then I boil the kettle behind the counter. I change the station: static, static, then David Attenborough talking about fireflies. I have an odd feeling I've heard this before, but I don't know when. I sit by the radio, petting a marmalade cat that has just slinked up, and I think about you sitting somewhere, in a shop with chandeliers.

Saturday, July 9, 2011

The Devil's Card

I am the Ace of Spades. The grimmest card.
Tricked out in ink's best tailoring and yet
I am no tawdry trump, no Diamond Jack
Still less a plaintive pip afraid to bet.

More gloried than the Queen of Hearts' own heart
My maker set his name on me alone;
Out-menacing the King of Clubs' own club
As devil's card I have a dark renown.

And then as Death I too am sometimes thought
And death and tax are twins as sure as sin
So they chose me to bear the duty stamp
Which proves that even excise men may grin.

***
(The Ace of Spades was indeed the card chosen by British excise to show the duty paid on the deck).

Thursday, June 23, 2011

It's one of those little things you learn as you become more familiar with the human race. Port is passed to the left, and Doctor Who is watched from behind the sofa. I don't have this - apparently universal - memory. I didn't watch Doctor Who when I was small. I think one of my sisters did. I remember it being on in the background. I did think Tom Baker was scary. But then I also thought the patches on the ceiling above my bunk bed were scary, and the wardrobe was pretty menacing. Mr Baker wasn't particularly notable for his power to unsettle.

So I came to the Doctor relatively late in life, when David Tennant and Billie Piper were doing their thing. (A cryptic comment on a BBC forum - 'i hate billie pipr. she a rat' - is the reason my husband and I refer affectionately to rats as billies.) I've watched it ever since, and rented out the previous Christopher Eccleston series too. I love the idea of the Doctor, and I always hope that the particular episode I'm watching will be worthy of that idea, but usually it's not. The last one I saw was written by Neil Gaiman, and was very good. In addition to having an imaginative plot, it steered clear of the oozing sentimentality that tends to gurgle up and immerse the valiant actors in awful, awful dialogue.

My Doctor Who film, sadly only showing on the screen in my brain, is dark and unsentimental. The Doctor is played by Michael Gambon, which I think you will agree is perfect casting. The Master is played by Ian Richardson. It's directed by Peter Greenaway.
The Time Lords, having quite a bit of dossing about to do, decide to amuse themselves by learning all about the universe. They make robots that they send back through time to shoot documentaries. (These are of course infinitely superior to Discovery Channel documentaries, due to the lack of great big clamouring egos.) They themselves never go back in time because it would fiddle about with causality (if that's the word I want). Apart from the odd scallywag Time Lad, after whom is sent a robot programmed to locate him & drag him back by his immortal ear. The Master is sort of like a police detective and in charge of this bit of Gallifreyan law-and-ordering. The Doctor, on the other hand, is very much in the scallywag camp and is a repeat offender. (At this point he's played by Sam whatsisname from 'Moon') Eventually he ends up doing something that prevents Gallifrey from ever existing. He survives as he was outside the normal time continuum, and so does The Master, who was following him, and the robot that was programmed to find him. The Master takes it all very badly and re-programmes the robot to kill The Doctor. However he realises that The Doctor will reincarnate again and again, each time looking different. So he tries to programme the robot to take this into account. But like many programmers he is a leetle bit over-confident and under-correct, and ends up creating the first Dalek, who just wants to destroy everything. Hurray! Cue Michael Gambon, on the run for years, about seventy percent of his youthful scallywaggery drained out of him, hunted by The Master and feeling a bit guilty about Gallifrey and the Dalek situation. After that, I don't know what happens. But I would like to.

Saturday, April 9, 2011

But is it a Rosa damascena or a Rosa gallica?

There is a library book which I have borrowed about four times, and for which I have paid late fines of about ten euro. When I saw this was going to continue, I finally bought my own copy. To me, it is as enjoyable as a box of chocolates. It has the array of choice, the collection of intriguing little descriptions, the mix of familiar and exotic names. It is the 'Complete Guide to Irish Wildlife' (Collins). Nothing warms my pedant's heart more than distinguishing Pignut from Cow Parsley, or Winter Aconite from Meadow Buttercup.

Of course Shakespeare asked 'What's in a name?' and a few years later Richard Feynman made the valid point that knowing the name for something isn't the same as knowing anything about its intrinsic qualities. (Although I believe this was because, as a kid, his friend knew the name of a bird & he didn't, and some decades and a Nobel prize later he still wasn't over it). Knowing the name of a plant doesn't necessarily tell you anything about it, but its name is like a key, and the key opens a chest of all the information ever shared about the plant. So I'd say knowing the name of something is pretty important.

I've always liked the name 'Groundsel'. Groundsel is a humble little weed that grows out of cracked paths and on roadsides. It seeds like a dandelion, only its seedheads are tiny, about a centimetre in diameter. Knowing its name makes it more pleasant to me. I recognise it, which is not the same as merely seeing it.

If you imagine a name as a key, you can imagine that the key will have qualities of its own. It might be a plain, uninteresting little key, or it might be ornate with curly bits and possibly gemstones. 'Groundsel' would be blackened copper, smallish, with maybe a subtle little flourish - the head (or bow) would be shaped like a clover-leaf, perhaps, as it would in an old-fashioned key. Groundsel sounds fittingly humble; happy, it would seem, to accept its low stature. I suppose I get this impression from the first bit, the 'ground' bit. Then it has a little slender 'sel' which suggests the old-fashioned, pretty bow. Groundsel. Because I know the name of it, every time I see it I remember a story I read when I was about six, the heroine of which sold groundsel when her evil stepmother turned her out on the streets. Apparently people bought it to feed to their budgies. (If you have a budgie, I take no responsibility for the possible ill effects of groundsel.)

The keys travel, sometimes all over the world, and when they do this they are often re-cut, but there will be something about the the bow that looks like it was made in Greece, or you'll find it is a copper key, from the mines of middle Europe. You can trace back its journey in a good dictionary.

I lay the little copper key on the page starting with grogshop and across from it, in the column beginning ground laurel, I find it.
- There you are! 'Ground'sel'... Why are you blushing? I didn't know copper could blush... it says, n. 1 A common herb of the composite family (genus Senecio), having yellow tubular flowers. 2 Groundsill. [OE gundaeswelgiae, lit., - stop rolling about! I'm reading this! - that swallows pus- ... - that swallows- ... -that swallows pus (with ref. to its use in poultices)...
-Oh.

Yes. Groundsel was used to draw on boils, and its name, deep down, reflects this. Funnily enough it was on an alternative medicine website where I saw its name being translated as 'ground swallower' because it 'grows so fast it seems to eat up the ground'. Hmm. I still don't know if the writer actually had reason to believe this, or if she just wanted to ignore the existence of pus in the world.

I said to the plant - you've always got your Latin name.
- Senecio Vulgaris.
- Vulgar Old Man.
- ...
Then I said - You know Richard Feynman?

Saturday, January 22, 2011

The mystery and science of huswiferie

I am not a good housekeeper. Between the two of us, my husband and I make one fairly bad housekeeper. We regularly have to throw food in the bin, the advent of guests has us frantically hoovering and chucking things in the spare room, and though we sometimes buy seeds and potted herbs, the seeds lie in miscellaneous drawers and the potted herbs wither and die. The only things that seem to grow are the potatoes in the cupboard.

I love cooking and will happily spend an entire day shopping for ingredients and concocting various mélanges - cooking is, to me, a nobler cousin of alchemy - but afterwards my teeny kitchen looks like it should have a war-correspondent standing in it, describing the debris in a grim-tinged-compassionate tone.

But what of it? As a feminist, surely I should revel in my ignorance of laundry symbols and my inability to sew a straight line. My lowest grade in my school exams was Home Economics, and I remember being vaguely proud of this. For centuries, housework was not an optional interest for women, it was a prescription for their entire drudge-filled, unpaid lives. So I still sympathise with my teenage distaste for it.

But now I've come to see it from a different angle. Early last year I visited the Geffrye Museum, in London. The museum's exhibits consist of drawing rooms through the 16th to 20th centuries. In the first room, there are excerpts from 16th & 17th century books on housekeeping. Gervase Markham's 'The English Hus-wife' (1615) spoke of 'the mystery and science of huswiferie'; other books - Thomas Tusser's 1580 book, '500 Points of Good Husbandry', Hannah Woolley's 'Accomplisht Lady's Delight' (1675) - listed the skills and branches of knowledge called upon by the task of running a household. Of course you can see this in modern books too - in one of my bids to tame my apartment, I bought 'The House-cleaning Bible' by Kim & Aggie, and flicking through it I can see many an esoteric fact concerning the strange properties of stains - but I think as a society, we forget that housekeeping is a formidable talent.

When these same tasks are removed into the commercial sphere, many are respected professions, a perfect example being cooking. But at this point they tend to be appropriated by men. There are female chefs, it's true, but aren't most of the famous ones men? Clothing - again, dominated by men who seem never to have seen an actual woman, only X-rays of them. And then the other disciplines cited in housekeeping books - accounting, gardening, practical chemistry (I don't see what else you could call cleaning, before the advent of Cillit Bang), interior design, management - none of these are ignominious. In his book, 'How Brains Think', William H Calvin proposes, as a definition of intelligence, 'what the brain does when you don't know what to do next'. Housekeeping, with its varying tasks, its open-endedness, seems to me a perfect example of intelligence in action. In fact, he even gives the specific instance of a person figuring out what to make for dinner from the available food in a fridge.
So why did housekeeping come to be seen as a no-brainer?

It was a belief I grew up with, that as long as a woman was a house-wife, she would never achieve equality with her husband. She was, in effect, his servant. The 1963 book by Helen Andelin, 'Fascinating Womanhood', bears out this notion:
"Revere your husband and honor his right to rule you and your children"
- the implication is, that the wife owes her husband, the bread-winner, a kind of fealty. The phrase 'lord and master' is eerily appropriate; the suggestion of feudalism is impossible to escape.
But now I think that the woman wasn't degraded by the work she did; I think that the work was degraded by the woman. Women held the second position in society, and so the work they did was viewed as being not as worthy as men's work, not because it was easier, or less essential, but because it could be done by them. Of course, this is only a theory, but consider the following, from the EU Commission on Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion:
"Jobs requiring similar skills, qualifications or experience tend to be poorly paid and undervalued when they are dominated by women rather than by men. For example, the (mainly female) cashiers in a supermarket usually earn less than the (mainly male) employees involved in stacking shelves and other more physical tasks."
(http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=682&langId=en)

Now, in sociological matters, I don't really believe in clean unidirectional cause and effect; humans are way too messy for that. Housework may have been devalued by its association with women, but then women may have been kept in a subordinate position by housework. Certainly when women pursue education and have an independent income, they are better placed to claim equality.

But to return to housework, and why it should be valued:
Apparently, the UK throws away 30% of its food every year. The US throws away 50%. When you work outside the home, it is difficult to plan meals & manage food efficiently. With the waste of food comes the waste of packaging, much of it plastic (glass is detrimental too due to its weight and the emissions given out in its recycling). Properly cared-for clothes, carpets and furniture last longer, and when you have time to clean properly you don't have to rely on harsh cleaning products.
(UK's food waste: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1460183,00.html ;
US: http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20041024002637data_trunc_sys.shtml )

For many people, it's not a straight swap between housework and a job, anyway; most people end up doing both. You get home, often after an hour's commute, and then you begin cooking or cleaning. Or you eat a ready-made meal, heavily packaged, expensive, and usually fairly unhealthy. A society where housekeeping is properly valued, is one with less waste and a better quality of life. Of course most couples can't afford to live on one salary but if I even start on how nonsensical I find our current economic system, I will be straying very much from the topic.

It's encouraging to see books appearing which celebrate domestic skills, and it seems that things like baking and knitting are fashionable these days. Could it possibly be that the elevation of the humble role of houskeeper has been effected by the corresponding emancipation of women? Are we taking it with us? I don't regret that low grade in Home Economics, because Home Economics was something at which I never wished to excel. But my resolution, this year, is to become an adept at the mystery and science of huswiferie.