Bi-Weekly Topics for July 15, 2004
The Secret Garden
By Feathers of Hope (Pica)
Well, it's not really so secret: this vaguely illegal garden sits at the corner of J and Second Streets in Davis, right next to the railway lines. It changes with the seasons; it's bedecked with plastic pumpkins around halloween, which morph into poinsettias in time for Christmas; full of pastels for easter.
This garden is tended by someone who--like Al of the 71--doesn't have a whole lot in the way of possessions. But he (I'll call him Arthur, though that's not his name) is of the world, perhaps more than you or I. Because he just decided, one day, to make this little corner of Davis more beautiful so that a benefactor might be able to see it on his way to work by bike. Just like that. (He waters it copiously with a hose from across the street.)
The garden that started out with a couple of potted plants is growing, and now has a second section to the right of the photo. Nobody can really see it from a moving train, and many people who head down 2nd Street barely give it a thought. There is nowhere in Davis quite so colorful.
Which just goes to show. Our gardener friend is colorblind. (It's a secret.)
This post is for the Ecotone Wiki's joint blogging topic, Secret Places, for July 15. The wiki has recently been vandalized by spammers; we're trying to keep it up and running but it's a bit of a battle.
Posted by Pica at July 15, 2004 07:51 PM
Comments
Hey, thank you for you efforts at keeping the spammers under control! I think it's worthwhile, but I know it's a lot of work. Maybe they'll give up eventually.
And thank you for your thoughtful writings, too.
P.
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2004/07/15/the_secret_garde.html
Terra incognita
By P.
It was sometime in March when my daughter came to me and demanded seeds to plant in a garden. She was quite vague about where it was, but after I handed her a handful of birdseed I noticed she was rooting around in the mud of a dank corner of the backyard, where a pine tree, our honeysuckle and some sparse wisteria shade a low spot nearly to blackness.
That "garden" was her second. The first was also out of sight, beyond the trunk of our maple tree. Planted in November, it didn't have much future, either, but several of her mother's herbs were abstracted from the herb garden. The part that got to me was the ring of rocks around the tiny plot -- in the middle of the lawn.
It may be she hid them because I had told her several times that you can't plant a garden in wintertime. Her reply was always, "Don't ever say 'impossible.' " I think she got that from "Barney," where they exhort kids never to give up -- on learning games, skills, cleaning their room. (The Stepford children on "Barney" never do mischief).
I suppose all real kids keep secrets, and that all kids hide things. We found little caches of hidden candy in my daughter's bedroom when she was as young as 3. We told her she didn't have to hide things, that she only needed to ask for decent food and sweets, but of course, we lied: Even at 3, she knew that we sometimes say no. Especially before dinner. It could have been worse; one of my daughter's friends, then still struggling over using the toilet, left a dry glob of something unspeakable under our couch one day.
I had my own secret places when I was a kid, though they were rentlessly turned out by my mother. Sometime in high school, when we learn so many lessons about adapting to the world, I read "The Purloined Letter" and discovered that the best way to hide something is to learn something about the psychology of whoever might be looking and then hide your secret in plain sight. Thereinafter, a lot of my private mail was merely interleaved with old homework papers, where I could find it but no one else would bother to look.
But by then I had liberty to roam, so I could look for other secret places, too. I loved topographic and historical maps that could point me to obscure hollows and old structures. I enjoyed poking around under bridges, too, though all I ever found there were waterbugs and graffiti. Once, hiking in the woods, I found a rough cabin some kids had built. It had a reeking mattress, cardboard on the walls and graffiti. And there was derelict house, its upper floors already collapsing, where I poked about for artifacts. I mostly found carpenter ants and graffiti. In my small town, there were few secret places that no one else knew.
Now that I am an adult, I can have privacy for the asking -- mostly, for with a child around you can never be sure. But I still take a half-guilty pleasure in glimpsing the interior of others' houses when the lights go on at dusk, and I love looking deep into the nooks and crannies of woodlands when they're just out of the snow and haven't had time to robe themselves again in leaves. Not that I ever see anything in the woods but junk and occasional graffiti.
Here in the big city, there really are secret places where ragged people go, and where I, as an overfed suburbanite, don't. (And the graffiti there is really thick.) A good deal of history lies down there, though, in the disused culverts and fenced-off wastelands. I've read that the ruins of a whole ghost town exists out behind a shopping area on the north side of town. I could probably trace the history of the lakes near my home if I would clamber down in the gorge they fill.
Poking into places is a boy's game, though, and I would merely be trespassing. Instead, I can defend my whole house as a secret place -- one, at least, where official intruders are unwelcome -- and insist that information about me is mine, and not a tool for someone else's marketing. But that's not place, it's politics.
Source: http://my.core.com/%7Epzicari/text/Secret.html
Cats And Nooks
By Feathers of Hope (Numenius)
This is a note for the Ecotone Wiki topic on secret places.
One of the things that has been amazing to watch while fostering our kittens is how cats have such a wonderful instinct for finding secret nooks. Last week I was clearing some space in one of our bookshelves on the floor, and it took the kittens about fifteen seconds to go across the room and be inside the newly created bookshelf space. And of course closet doors are notorious difficult to open without attracting the attention of a kitty or two. It's a very different world than ours to explore if you're about eight inches tall, sleek, and graceful.
Here's a photo of Charlie retreating under our bed, the space under our bed being a very defensible position.
Posted by Numenius at July 16, 2004 10:14 PM
Comments
Yes, I guess it's that predator instinct. I like the thought - don't know if it's the dominant paradigm among physical anthropologists yet - that human beings are scavengers "designed" to be able to walk about in the heat of noon (hence this ridiculous and inefficient bipedalism).
Posted by: Dave at July 17, 2004 06:40 AM
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2004/07/16/cats_and_nooks.html
Truth teller
By Via Negativa
The komo is thirsty; the power grid could go at any moment. Where can we get more juice?
Ah, go ask the dawn's griot, that rooster. If he didn't crow, the sky would never redden. He flaps up to the roof and looks all around. He waits. Feels the eyes of the night spirits greedy on the teeth of his comb.
Who among men could be so unafraid? The four-legged stool in the courtyard is silent; it hoards its stories. The granary guard dog's nose twitches with fear, though the faintest rustle of his chain makes the nighttime walker soil his pants.
Without the right words, no action can bear fruit. We shrink into thin shadows, moonlit things. Who gave this scrawny bird such power?
Ringed in gardens, shaded by kapok trees, the village seems a cozy place. But secret jealousies crouch in the rafters of a dozen huts. Buried hatreds come alive at night, grow fur and fangs - no joke. Even the Christians know better than to leave nail clippings or the hair from their combs lying around where someone might pick them up.
But ah, the rooster! If he cares, he doesn't show it. His eyes at midnight still sparkle with the light of noon.
Call then, bring the dawn! Sing, and I will say namu for you. Tell the truth.
He stretches out his neck, flapping his wings like a blacksmith's helper pumping at the bellows. Kambu kaaru, kambu kambu kaaru! Wanjuburung, wanjabarang!*
Friend rooster, even if you knew this dawn would be your last, would you do anything differently? Let the first line of white streak the sky. Let feet feel for sandals, let pestles grope about for mortars. Let no one hear how, hidden in the rafters of the komo house, buried in jars under the floor, the secret generators are sputtering, thirsty for fuel.
Nothing is free in this world. For order and reason to prevail, everyone must give up some cherished thing: a flap of skin, perhaps. A favorite food. A fortnight's worth of company with women. To every being, God has given the power of some gift.
The white band grows. A splash of red. The rooster crows as if his life depended on it.
__________
* Mandinka onomatopoeia, lifted from Hunters and Crocodiles: Narratives of a Hunter's Bard, by Bakari Kamara (edited and translated by Gordon Innes with Bakari Sibide, Paul Norbury Publications, 1990).
Komo is the pre-eminent secret society among the Mande people. Here, I have applied the term to its power objects as well.
This is my contribution to Ecotone wiki's July 15 topic, Secret Places. Be sure to check out the others. At the end of her own entry, Pica notes that "the wiki has recently been vandalized by spammers; we're trying to keep it up and running but it's a bit of a battle." So, see it while it lasts.
in other words I find different worlds
By alembic
This post is a late addition for the Ecotone Wiki's joint blogging topic, Secret Places:
One person's public place is another's secret space. In a distant past, when there were vast territories still unmapped, there were secret places everywhere, though, I imagine, few of them held nostalgic charms for those who stumbled on them accidentally on their way to somewhere else.
Nowadays, we spend most of our waking hours in public places and spaces, from the physical, where we jostle in the crowds, to the more subliminal, like the blogosphere, for example, where we jostle for attention. These days, too, we talk endlessly ... which makes the idea of secrets almost moot.
And yet, in the ceaseless conversation that bares and expands both the visible and the invisible places and spaces we inhabit, there are still plenty of secret places to be had. If the definition of secret depends on stealth, then you need not look any further than your eyes can see, for right here, or anywhere you happen to be, there are all sorts of secret spaces hiding in plain view.
For example, the bus stop at the corner of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard and Barry Way in Greenbrae is as public as it gets, with cars streaming by from all directions at all hours. And yet, at odd times of the day, the perfectly groomed young woman, with great sense of color in her choice of vestments, stands there, wildly gesticulating without so much a cursory nod to public decorum. She calls on god mostly, but lately, I caught her campaigning for Bush with that same abandon she had formerly reserved for the almighty. I presume, and maybe incorrectly, that her appearances at this bus stop have something to do with her haphazard intake of her meds.
I am in no position to tell where this young woman thinks she really is when she takes up her post at the bus stop. It seems to me that as far as we are concerned, for those of us who drive by (or walk past her, as I sometimes do), she is in a secret place ' in a space in which there is little room for any of us. I don't know if she thinks of that bus stop as her secret place. Maybe she knows exactly where she is, but she doesn't give a fig about decorum. Or, maybe this is her secret place, the one and only place where the sacred is visibly manifest to her. Her sense of purpose, which lights up her face as she flails her arms, certainly would suggest this.
There are less obvious ways to retreat into a secret space in a public place. And I should know, for I have my own secret places in plain public view ' though, thanks to less malfunction in my brain chemistry, I don't have to flail my arms to get there....
If words had dimensions (and for those with synesthesia, they may well have), the geography of secret places is increased exponentially. There is a sense in which my love of languages is a substitute for adventure ' for travel and all those other ways that get you out of yourself and into the world in which you can find secret places by the dozen.
Uttering the word for something as mundane as apple in the languages I know can transport me ' if not literally, at least literarily ' into different realms. One word, like some magical incantation, can place me in a space where the sun shines differently, or the stars' crewelwork makes the night sky as foreign as I suddenly feel in the very place in which I am standing and thinking in that other language.
I may not be gesticulating and engaging in loud debates with imaginary people, as the girl does on the corner of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard and Barry Way, but I am pretty much in another world myself whenever I opt to switch languages in that silent babble that fills echo chambers deep within each of our skulls.
Posted by maria at August 15, 2004 04:24 PM
Comments
Maria, I think you're really on to something here. I tried your "apple" trick and got transported to various European markets with their associated smells, colors, bustle... might this be another reason to teach languages to those whose ability to travel is limited in some way? Though for me that would lose the associations I have with the places I've been, which to me are tied inherently to the languages spoken there. But through books, as you suggest... I'm not sure you have to have been to France to get the full madeleine/tisane experience in Proust, but it definitely is different in translation.
I keep thinking about Temple Grandin and her famous ability to visualize something as a composite of many things she's seen in the past, and then render that on paper. I wonder what happens when a visual thinker (I mean visual thinker off the charts like Grandin) thinks visually in different languages?
Posted by: Pica on August 16, 2004 06:33 AMBeautiful post, Maria. And Pica, your experiment prompted me to attempt my own. You're right: it's incredibly evocative, and different, to try out different languages in the hunt for a re-seeing of old places and old things. And this reminded me of that old practice of abandoning language entirely, and looking - experiencing - an apple as if one had never heard or see of such a fruit.
But I'm meandering off topic, though. We all have secret places in our heads. Thank you, Maria, for the reminder.
Posted by: Siona on August 16, 2004 04:13 PM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20041014111052/http://www.ashladle.org/archives/000403.html