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Ferrebeekeeper’s love of gardens is well known, but there is an aspect of gardens which I love nearly as much as the gardens themselves. Yet they are not really plants or gardens. They can be found beyond the garden in public squares or in the center of deserts…in preschools or in abandoned palaces. I am speaking, of course, of fountains and I intend to put a lot more images of ornamental water features on this blog. To start with I am featuring this ornate geometric tree fountain from an unknown location in Morocco. I guess if I had a fountain I would want a baroque fountain with lots of river gods and naked nymphs and ogee shapes…but the Islamic conception of sumptuously tiled fountains with beautiful arabesque curves made of filigree might be just as elegant. I will post more pictures of these treasures…and I also need to write about the Lote Tree (I have a suspicion the tree in this fountain might allude to it (but who can say). There is more to follow! Thanks for bearing with me. Sometimes the fountain is a rivulet and sometimes it is a mighty torrent but it is always flowing.
Romulus and Remus, the mythological demigod twins who founded Rome were sons of the war god Mars. After being left to die, the infants were suckled by a she-wolf in a sacred cave and later raised in pastoral beauty by the shepherd Faustulus. The twins experienced other exciting Tintin-style adventures with sundry bandits, rebels, exiled kings, grandfathers, and what-not. Yet the part of their mythological story which is arguably of greatest interest is when the brothers decided to found the city of Rome. Immediately the twins (who had been inseparable allies through battles, love affairs, tribal intrigues, and wolf-childhood) fell out over…urban planning. Romulus wished to build on the Palatine Hill, (above the cave where they were reared); Remus, however, preferred the Aventine Hill. They argued fiercely and finally decided to let the gods decide.
Messages from the gods can be also be divisive and the oracular battle between the brothers did not end their dispute. Remus saw six birds flying above his hill and proclaimed that the gods favored the Aventine. Romulus saw a full dozen birds over the Palantine and proclaimed that the deities wished for this hill to be the heart of their city. The argument over the direction their society would take and what the gods were really trying to say about how the nation should be built and administered caused the brothers to fall out forever. Soon Remus was dead (perhaps by one of Romulus’ supporters but maybe at the hands of Romulus himself) and the Palantine became the center of Rome. Yet the dispute left its shadow and Rome was always torn between battling rulers (both hills became great, but the Palantine was always foremost). The story is a myth, of course, but it is the Romans’ own myth about how their society came into existence.
I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving, but, oof, the Monday after Thanksgiving is always a rough day. The holiday season has just started—but hasn’t gotten fun yet (my tree is badly assembled with no lights or ornaments—the cats have been climbing through it like gibbons in a hatrack and have knocked it over once already). Additionally, the quotidian dictates of work combine with the gray bleakness of November to create a feeling of malaise which makes blogging difficult. Also, it is 11:30 PM already. What the jazz?
To combat these problems and get something down on paper (and to kick off the holiday season?) here is a visual post—a gallery of incredible vibrant cuttlefish from the world’s warm seas. Hopefully there color will bring some pizzazz to your day. Finding them online actually helped me get back in the groove.
The flamboyant cuttlefish—the purple and yellow master of poison–rightfully has pride of place at the very top of the post, however there are some cuttlefish which I haven’t written about here too. As soon as I have a bit more time I will come back and write about them. As we get into December we will have more exciting and thoughtful posts which aren’t a placeholder like this one.
Also, I am still working on the thrilling project which I teased earlier (although, like everything, it is taking longer than I planned). For now, enjoy this little rainbow of sorbet tentacles and w-shaped eyes. It’s going to be a merry holiday season and there are wonders ahead of us. First we have to get a bit further into the workweek though….
Okay! I haven’t been writing about turkeys as much as I should and Thanksgiving is on THURSDAY! Where did the year go? Fortunately, I still have some pictures left over from my trip home to my parents’ farm back in September. I have written about the geese and the renegade bourbon turkeys of the past, but this year my parents were passing by the grain store and there were poults for sale. So now there is a whole new crop of turkeys running around again (which is good because they are my favorite barnyard creatures). Here are some turkey photos and I show up in them too (both because of the shameful personal vanity which characterizes this era and because the lens on the front of my camera is cracked after an incident with some buttery fingers and an online fruit pie recipe).
If you are curious what breed of turkeys these guys are, they are putatively broad-breasted bronze, but they don’t really look like the broad breasted bronze turkeys of my youth. They are all lanky and tall! These turkeys are pretty endearing and always come over to quizzically see what people are up to, but don’t be fooled–they are not completely domesticated and they are always getting in trouble. Lately they have taken to escaping the poultry yard by walking way back into the woods where there is no fence and then coming back around the outside of the fence so they can stand in the road. It isn’t a completely stupid strategy since there are all sorts of fat grasshoppers and suchlike tasty bus by the road, but people drive fast and carelessly and it takes a big bird some time to get off the ground.
I don’t think my parents have any plans to eat these noble fowl as part of annual giving-of-thanks ritual sacrifice. These are lucky ornamental (or pet?) turkeys, but they are flagrantly transgressing against America’s love affair with motor carriages, open roadways, and unsafe speeds. So maybe the turkeys are walking up the great pyramid towards sacrifice even if they are spared from the platter. Hopefully they can learn road safety before it is too late, because I really like them. Look at those droll facial expressions!
There are two amazing pieces of space news today to shock and astonish you. First, we have found a near-analog to planet Earth orbiting a red dwarf star—and it is “only” 11 light-years from our Solar System. The exoplanet is named Ross 128b and it is orbiting a quiet red dwarf star (most red dwarves are subject to solar flares which release life cleansing jolts of exotic radiation, but, like our delightful Sun, Ross 128 seems to be much more sedate (perhaps its placid life has something to do with its bland name which makes it sound like a dullard clone friend on an 90s sitcom). In this age of exoplanet discovery, it is easy to lose sight of what an astonishing find this is, but I grew up in a world with only nine known planets. Remember back when Ferrebeekeeper was rhapsodizing about weird icy oddballs like Gliese 581 g? Ross 128B seems like it roughly the same size and temperature as Earth and it is right in our backyard. Additionally, it is moving towards us, in a mere 78000 years it will be the closest exoplanet to Earth!
The other “news” is more conditional and vague, but no less exciting to me. NASA has been floating the concept of a balloon mission to Venus. I have been hoping for more attention to our nearest neighbor (since I harbor fantasies of living there, in the sweet spot above the merciless clouds) a balloon probe to see what the atmosphere is actually like would let us know whether his fantasy is at all workable. The Soviet Union actually sent some balloon probes to Venus back in the early days of interplanetary exploration, but they were crude things which were not built to last and they told us little. Let’s do it right this time and find out everything about our mysterious sister planet! It is going to be a little while before Ross 128B is in range so let’s explore the immediate neighborhood and get to work on living abroad while there is still time!
This year for Halloween we featured a list of amazing snake monsters from around the world…and yet the world is a big place and snakes are widely feared and revered. Therefor we are looping back to Africa for a final amazing snake deity. This is Nyami Nyami, god of the Zambezi river and one of the masters of the entrance to the underworld. Nyami Nyami has the body of a fish and the head of a snake (he sounds kind of like a giant catfish to me). Nyami Nyami was sacred to the Batonga people who lived beside the Zambezi in what is today Zambia. His particular home was said to be the Kariba rock, a great mid river escarpment located in a narrow gorge. Here Nyami Nyami could slide between worlds in order to explore the watery realms of the afterlife or he could come back to Earth to visit his equally aquatic onster wife who lives in the lower Zambezi where it empties into the Indian Ocean…or he could travel to the upper upper river (since other tribemen claim he dwells in the realm of foam and thunder beneath Victoria Falls).
At any rate, in the mid-1950s the Kariba Gorge was chosen as the location for a huge hydroelectric dam. Nyami Nyami’s worshipers among the Batonga were sure the dam would not happen because of the god’s wrath and indeed a freak cyclone (and the attendant flood) nearly scuppered the project, but the dam was built and the Kariba rock is beneath the water. Some say the Nyami Nyami is angered because he is separated from his spouse. Others think he has fled from this world to leave humans to their own devices. Yet worship of Nyami Nyami continues unabated and he has become an even more popular deity and symbol of the region (staffs carved in his likeness are sold to tourists or given to revered guests). Perhaps the great snake god still watches the river to the same extent he ever did, just waiting for the dam to silt up and be brought down. Let me know if you are ever heading to the Zambezi, it sounds like a beautiful river. Maybe you will catch a glimpse of the huge serpentine god in the watery depts. Or in the shadows beneath Victoria Falls.
It has been a while since I posted any of my flounder drawings on this blog, but don’t worry, ever since my art show back in August I have been working as harder than ever at drawing and sculpting allegorical flatfish. Indeed, I am working on a new show with some spectacular projects…but more about that later. For right now here are two small fish drawings. The first, above, is titled “Haywain Flatfish” and is meant to evoke the splendor of harvest season. A bewhiskered yokel carries off a sack of millet as the pumpkins ripen in the golden fields. An industrious beaver has been similarly productive and sits beaming beside his perfectly constructed dam. Although the scene conveys bucolic tranquility, the hollow black eyes of the fulsome flounder (and the circling vulture) speak of the coming austerity and darkness of winter.
This second image “AlienHeartSole” shows a flounder/sole with what looks like a big-hearted alien tentacle monster flying upon it in a personalized saucer. Although the alien seems benign, the imbecilic sphinx with a javelin, the bomb, and the tattered angel throwing a dart all suggest that this is an amoral and perplexing galaxy. Only the laid-back rooster offers a modicum of sanguine confidence…and it is unclear whether the gormless bird understands what is going on. If you enjoy these little tragi-comic images, you should follow me on Instagram (where Ferrebeekeeper goes by the sobriquet “GreatFlounder”). There you will find a great trove of colorful and enigmatic flatfish art. As part of the project which I mentioned above, I am trying to bring my various digital /web content into a more tightly networked gestalt, so I would be super appreciative for any Instagram follows!
More peculiar news from the heavens above (although I am not sure I I understand astrophysics well enough to articulate what makes it so strange). Based on spectrographic analysis, scientists have identified a Type 2A supernova half-a-billion light years away “in” the constellation of Ursa Major. Unlike other supergiant supernovas of this category, the stellar explosion did not fade after 100 of our Earth days but continued to shine for 600 days—quite an explosion! (although explosions seen from 500 million light years away are already disquieting enough). Also, supernova explosions are marked by spectral lines which reveal the dying star ejecting fast moving remnants—which are then followed by slower moving remnants. In this case however there were no slower-moving remnants.
A hint to what is going on with this star lies in the fact that it was apparently observed going supernova back in 1954 (although our observatories were much less sophisticated back then). Perhaps IPTF14hls is a star which went partially supernova and then finally fully exploded in a bizarre and interesting way. Maybe this foreshadows the fate of Eta Carinae—which I am sure is now gone. I have always hoped we will see a stupendous supernova from Eta Carinae in my lifetime and this potentially bodes well. However it also suggests that scientists need to work on their supernova behavior and prediction models.
Childeric was a Frankish king who was born in the middle of the 5th century AD and lived to around 480 AD. He was the son of Merovech (after whom the Merovingians were named) and the father of Clovis I who united the Franks and was thus arguably the first king of France. Childeric has an interesting life with lots of weird seductions and thrilling battles against the Goths, however these cinematic aspects of his career scarcely concern us here… instead we are talking about the tomb of Childeric which was discovered in 1653 in what is today Belgium. The 12th-century church of Saint-Brice in Tournai was built close to Childeric’s grave (although who knows if this was by design or by accident?). Childeric’s grave was filled with rich treasures of 5th century Frankish craft, which were given first to the Hapsburgs who presented the find to Louis IVX (who, as the apogee of absolutist monarchs, was somewhat unimpressed with the pieces and kept them in his library rather than his vault).
The treasure of Childeric’s tomb included a golden bull, some coins, a signet ring, and other such precious odds and ends. The real highlight of the collection however were 300 golden insects inlaid with garnets (these mysterious jeweled bugs were most commonly regarded as bees) which were sewed onto the monarch’s grave cloak. These bees inspired the bees of Napoleon (who was looking for insignia which was symbolic of France but which was not the fleur-de-lis of the Bourbons). Unfortunately, the vast majority of Childeric’s bees were stolen and melted down during a break-in during 1831. Only two of the splendid red and gold bees remain. Fortunately we still have the engravings which were commissioned by Leopold William, governor of the Austrian Netherlands (the aristocrat to whom the treasures of Childeric’s grave were first presented).
My garden this year was not necessarily the magical success which I had hoped for it to be…but that’s ok, I can just write about someone else’s garden. My go-to garden for this kind of lazy blogging is Longwood Garden, a magical gilded age paradise in Chester County Pennsylvania which was the summer seat of the DuPont family.
Autumn is not the traditional apex of the gardening season, however Longwood Garden is such a stupendous garden that its planners can insouciantly eschew such conventional thinking. Every season is the apex of the gardening season there…up to and including winter (which is no petty feat in our temperate clime). To celebrate late autumn, Longwood created a Chrysanthemum festival with thousands of chrysanthemums agonizingly shaped into geometric forms by otherworldly patience (and by weird sadistic potting contraptions).
The effect is stupendous—it’s like what would happen if the world were invaded and colonized by beautiful alien flowers with a disturbing penchant for symmetry (although I guess that sort of did happen at the end of the Cretaceous). I hope someday I manage to actually get to Longwood to see the Chrysanthemum Festival in person. These pictures never do justice to the ineffable power of their pleasure gardens. The show runs until November the 19th so maybe my East Coast readers want to visit too.
ferrebeekeeper 