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Happy New Year! And happy National Bird Day (which Americans apparently observe on January 5th)!
Now most birds (like most animals) are having quite a hard time of it out there in a world which is relentlessly shaped by humanity’s boundless appetites. This is a problem which we need to work on every day for the rest of our lives (because the world without its exquisite animals would be a terrible world not even worth bothering with). However, I also understand that constantly writing about how we are making the world into a ghastly necropolis is dispiriting. Also it is still the Christmas season (at least until Three Kings Day tomorrow).
Therefore, to celebrate bird day and to celebrate Christmastime and the hopes for the new year (which aren’t quite ruined yet) I am posting pictures of some of my favorite bird ornaments from my holiday tree of life. This serves a double purpose since my mother complained that the ornaments were not visible in the previous pictures of the tree (this tree is not an easy thing to take pictures of!)
Admittedly, this is not as good as writing about these incredible birds and how they live. But once again we encounter a problem: the only bird whom I currently know well (LG the Canada goose) did not have a very good holiday. We will explain his sadness and discomfiture later, but for right now, why not enjoy this anhinga.
…and just for fun, here is one more picture of the whole tree. Happy Three Kings Day! We will get back to the serious business of writing about ecology, politics and the underworld as we get deeper into 2023, but for now kiss a bird (like the despondent LG, for example) and have a wonderful end to your holiday.
Happy Winter Solstice! I am sorry about 2022. I meant to blog more, and answer everyone’s comments, and write a consolidated treatise defending liberalism against the neo-fascists who are everywhere, and post my new monastic orchid illuminations, etc., etc., etc. Alas, not everything got done the way I wanted and now it is the darkest night of the year (the real end of the year, in my book, although I guess there is a week or so of Saturnalia before 2023 truly gets here according to the calendar).
We will work on all of this next year (and much more besides) but before sending the year off, I wanted to share some pictures of my sacred tree of life (an annual tradition). Look! it has even more cephalopods, turkeys, waterfowl, and ancient mammals (plus all of the animals I could get my hands on from every other branch of the great zoological family tree too).
My flounder art (sigh) was about trying to reposition the natural world at the center of what humans find sacred: the religions of Abraham treat the natural world as contemptible–and we are all suffering because of it. Sadly, the fish gods I made did not grab people’s attentions despite their portentous deep-sea secrets. However a few holiday guests have stared at the holiday tree of life for a looooong time before brushing away some tears–so perhaps it actually does get the point across to some degree.
And of course, I saved the best thing for last! My late feline life companion, Sepia (wipes away a few tears of my own) did not enjoy the public eye and so I did not put her in my blog. My present housecat, Sumi Cat, feels much differently and likes to be the constant center of attention. Here are some pictures of her loving little face to help you stave off the primordial darkness (although, ironically, black cats are always hard to photograph and doubly so on the darkest night of the year). Sumi and I hope that you are safe and warm and happy this holiday season! May your dreams come true and may the great tree of life always bloom with fulsome new growth!
We will talk again before 2023, but for now, season’s greetings and good (longest) night!
Happy Halloween! As a special inktober treat for the special day, here is another little allegorical ink drawing of our times featuring strange orchid bishops sheltering in their Romanesque monasteries. The churchmen (who do not seem especially holy or worthwhile) interact with their doomed milieu through their little handheld personal communication devices. Meanwhile the haunted world outside is subject to dragon attack, volcanic eruption, war, and doom.
As ever, the strip of nature in the foreground is the true key to the meaning of the composition.
It is already the end of October…which means it is time for Ferrebeekeeper’s annual Halloween theme week! This year we are going to celebrate artistically…which is to say with a series of Inktober drawings. For those of you who somehow manage to spend your life away from the electric seduction of the internet, “Inktober” is an awkward portmanteau made by sewing “ink” and “October” together. The word and the concept were invented by draftspeople who wanted the world to take a longer look at the ink drawings which we ruined our clothes and furniture to produce for you.
This is a little drawing made with various indelible inks on terra-cotta colored Canson paper. In the image, a racoon-like coati scurries through the rainforests of Central America surrounded by various beetles, orchids, vines, slime molds, butterflies, and glass frogs. In the background a volcano spews out lava and broiling clouds of ash and gas. While in the foreground someone has thoughtfully cut open a delicious soursop fruit for us. Yum! (More about this delicious fruit in following posts).
The coati may not strike you as an ideally spooky Halloween animal (even with their bandit masks and cunning hands, I find them endearing and winsome). However Europeans of the 16th century were much more alarmed by the clever New World mammals, and coatis somehow became an emblem of witchcraft during that unhappy century of witch-hunts and religious pogroms. In order to evoke this feeling I have included a Pre-Columbian sculpture with a mysterious fungus (or miniature civilization?) spilling out of its dark belly. The tumbled-down ruins of some MesoAmerican step-temple likewise hint at the doom which humankind carries with us like a curse. Hopefully the coati and the rainforest denizens can escape the consequences of our folly…but probably not. Let me know what you think, and get ready for more Inktober artworks!
Ferrebeekeeper has been over-reliant on garden posts lately. Yet the last days of spring/first days of summer are such a beautiful time, that I thought I would put up some more pictures anyway. Most years I select tulips to bloom at the same time as the cherry tree, but, last autumn I apparently picked out whatever took my fancy and paid no attention to the timeline. As a result there were lots of frilly, fringed, or otherwise baroque tulips blooming in late May!
As the tulips faded, the roses, impatiens, and torenias started to bloom. The rose pictured below has the splendid name “Cherry Frost” which sounds like a sinister James Bond girl or a punk band or something. Because it was transgenically tinkered with, the little rose is surprisingly resistant to blackspot and molds. Additionally, it does well in low light and cold (at least so far). This rose was blooming back in February…but I did not post the pictures because the blossoms were not nearly as beautiful (and the rest of the garden was fallow).
Speaking of lying fallow, I recognize that I did not post a great deal for the last few weeks, and I apologize. Sometimes it is necessary to take a little break to think of new ways to express oneself. This in no way indicates that I have lost my enthusiasm for writing about art and science or opining about the affairs of the world! It does however mean that I have been working on some new artistic themes (maybe the poor misunderstood flounders need to lie fallow for a little while too). In the meantime, I have been sitting in the garden working on new ideas…and how to explain/popularize them.
We will explore this more in soon-to-follow posts, but for right now, I hope you are enjoying June too (and maybe have some lovely flowers of your own). Don’t give up on coming here for posts (nor on anything else for that matter). Sometimes things take their own time to germinate (just like this year’s late tulips).
Every year Ferrebeekeeper features posts about the voluminous cherry blossoms from the splendid Kwanzan cherry tree which grows in the back garden. For a week or two the garden becomes an unearthly place of lambent beauty which resembles the western paradise of Amitabha Buddha. But what about the week after?
Well, the answer is all too clear from these photos. The blossoms fall. In the week after they bloom there is a crazy shag carpet of princess pink all across the garden and in the neighbor’s lawn. Also this carpet is far stickier and wetter than it looks. After I took these pictures, I went inside to get something and then came downstairs to see that great pathways of pink blossoms were cast upon the hardwood floors and carpets. The first stunned thought I had was that someone had let a Roman emperor (and his blossom-throwing votaries) into the house. Only after a moment did it occur to me that the distinctly-non-imperial petal-treader was actually this author (and then I went for the even-more-non-imperial dustpan).
Despite the fact that it is composed of hundreds of thousands of tiny moist decals waiting to adhere to everything, the blossom carpet has its own sort of beauty. The real letdown comes in the days afterwards–when it all turns to taupe goo. Fortunately we should have some May flowers by then to distract our attention to elsewhere in the garden! Maybe the Brooklyn weather will finally become May-like as well. In the meantime I will continue to pretend I am in the court of Elagabalus (a fiction which grows easier by the minute as our republic descends into political incoherence) and hope that my roommates are not too incensed by the petals which the dustpan missed.
Every year when the cherry blossoms bloom, I like to draw and paint pictures of the garden. Although I am never satisfied with the pictures when I am working on them (since they only capture the tiniest fraction of the garden’s beauty), I am often pleased later in the year. It is almost like canning fruit: fresh fruit is obviously much better, but at least you have a little preserved portion of the heavenly taste later on. Additionally, painting the same subject year after year also provides a sort of benchmark to assess the media and techniques I am using. At any rate here are two of the pictures I painted. Above is a full watercolor sketch of the yard and below is a little drawing in pink, gray, and black ink which I made in my pocket sketchbook. Let me know what you think!
I apologize for not writing any posts last week. I got upset hearing about how blogging is dead and only podcasts and video content matter (also I was seduced away from the stupid, worthless internet by the evanescent beauty of the cherry tree). But, even if writing is worthless and doesn’t matter and the only people of any importance are rich blathersome celebrities, it hardly seems right to leave all opinion-making to them. So I will try to make up for last week’s absence by posting more this week!
Pursuant these matters, April is poetry month, and I failed to write a post about poetry! So, in a spirit of year-round poetry appreciation, here is a quiet poem which seems to fit with this year’s cold spring and various worldwide crises. The poem was written by the largely-forgotten poet, Charlotte Mew (an unhappy spinster whose large family was destroyed by mental illness and bankruptcy). Although Charlotte Mew died in 1928, she saw the ways of the world clearly and her poem feels like it could be about the present. Likewise, although the poem is about what it is about (large beautiful trees being cut up and carried off), it is also clearly about bankruptcy, downfall, ruin, and defeat. Finally, somehow there is a lowly (yet pitiable) dead rat in the poem which makes me think of posts about the despised (yet morally righteous) rats. But enough talk, here is Charlotte Mew’s lovely poem about sycamore trees:
The Trees are Down
—and he cried with a loud voice:
Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees—
(Revelation)
They are cutting down the great plane-trees at the end of the gardens.
For days there has been the grate of the saw, the swish of the branches as they fall,
The crash of the trunks, the rustle of trodden leaves,
With the ‘Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas,’ the loud common talk, the loud common laughs of the men, above it all.
I remember one evening of a long past Spring
Turning in at a gate, getting out of a cart, and finding a large dead rat in the mud of the drive.
I remember thinking: alive or dead, a rat was a god-forsaken thing,
But at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive.
The week’s work here is as good as done. There is just one bough
On the roped bole, in the fine grey rain,
Green and high
And lonely against the sky.
(Down now!—)
And but for that,
If an old dead rat
Did once, for a moment, unmake the Spring, I might never have thought of him again.
It is not for a moment the Spring is unmade to-day;
These were great trees, it was in them from root to stem:
When the men with the ‘Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas’ have carted the whole of the whispering loveliness away
Half the Spring, for me, will have gone with them.
It is going now, and my heart has been struck with the hearts of the planes;
Half my life it has beat with these, in the sun, in the rains,
In the March wind, the May breeze,
In the great gales that came over to them across the roofs from the great seas.
There was only a quiet rain when they were dying;
They must have heard the sparrows flying,
And the small creeping creatures in the earth where they were lying—
But I, all day, I heard an angel crying:
‘Hurt not the trees.’
Hi everyone! Happy Earth Day! For now, I will spare you from the posts about the state of our planetary ecosystem and its fraught relationship with the intelligent invasive primate causing so much trouble everywhere (although you can read some past thoughts about that here), and instead show some garden photos. The gorgeous Kwanzan tree which lives in my backyard in Brooklyn is abloom and I have been sitting beneath the tree enjoying fleeting feelings of ineffable beauty instead of writing blog posts. We will return in full force at some pint next week. In the meantime I have tried to capture some of the garden beauty in the pictures below.
The cherry tree is starting to get older and most of the eye-level branches have died out, but there are still gorgeous blossoms higher up where the limbs get sun! More about the tree next week, when I hopefully have some artworks finished…
Some people regard pansies and violas as sort of tawdry flowers, but I think they are as beautiful as the most exotic Miltonia in terms of sheer prettiness. If they were more rare we would probably think they are the most gorgeous blossoms in the garden. But they are not rare…because they are super tough! I planted the little black violas back in October and they shrugged off the full force of winter’s blast with shocking indifference.
Another favorite plant which is blooming right now is the bleeding heart. I planted a white one too, but it is presently only 5 centimeters high, so you may have to wait to see its blossoms.
It looks like the tulips will bloom later, but some species tulips and volunteers have come up. Below are more pictures of tulips and Johnny-jump-ups.
There is an ornamental crabapple in the back of the garden which is as lovely as the cherry (in some respects). Unfortunately it is less photogenic, but you can see some of the pretty magenta blooms above the hellebore and the single lonely muscari.
And here is a picture of the gardener, looking peeved that everything did not bloom at once (he never seems perfectly happy, no matter how wonderfully the flowers perform). In the near future, we will return to traditional Earth Day themes of the proper path humankind must chart in order not destroy the living systems of Earth (we all need to think a lot more about that and push back against powerful interests which assert that it is not a thing to be thought about). The garden is a way to start thinking about such things (for it is a problematic artificial ecosystem), but for the moment, let’s just enjoy the blossoms.
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! Every year, Ferrebeekeeper dedicates today’s blog post to the myths and legends of the fair green island. This tradition started back in 2011 with a post about Ireland’s unofficial mascots, the leprechauns (those little magical men did some heavy lifting in popularizing this blog and they are still the second or third most popular post of all time). Subsequent years featured the sad tale of Oisín and Niamh, a description of the dark sky spirits which haunt the night sky, the tale of Daghda’s harp (which is there on the old flag), the myth of the leannán sídhe (a vampire woman who represents life as an artist), and the story of the salmon of wisdom (a metaphorical fish of universal knowledge). These tales are wonderful (and horrible too) but they are all from Ireland’s pre-Christian past, so for this SAINT Patrick’s Day, let’s head to the Christian myths of Ireland.
Now the hagiography of Saint Patrick himself has always struck me as a bit dull (plus, old Patrick was really from England anyway!) however his contemporary, Saint Ciarán of Saigir was a churchman much more in the florid style of ancient Irish myth–and a noted animal lover rather than a persecutor of serpents. Although the details of the lives of (possibly mythological) magical bishops from the dark ages are a bit uncertain, it seems that Ciarán was born in the 5th century as a noble in Osraigh (that link is pretty interesting but also so painfully Irish that I felt like I was drinking Harp beer and listening to a lilting ancient in some stone tavern when I read it). Ciarán’s first miracle occurred when he was a child. A predatory kite swooped down and killed a little songbird sitting on a nest in front of the boy. Ciarán admonished the kite for its cruelty and then breathed life back into the little bird.
Realizing that the compassionate new faith was for him, Ciarán went abroad to learn the ways of the church. After studying Christianity at Tours and then at Rome, young Ciarán returned to Ireland in the 6th century and built a stone hermit’s cell in the woods of Upper Ossory. His first converts were forest creatures who took up the monastic habit upon hearing Ciarán’s sermons, so parts of his hagiography read like Redwall with Brother Badger, um, badgering Lay Brother Fox about the latter’s habit of stealing footwear. His miracles are a bit peculiar as well, and include transforming the water of a well into a potent intoxicant with the taste of honey and performing a magical abortion on a raped nun named Bruinnech (reading between the lines here, this seems like a story of preventing honor killings and stopping an ever-escalating cycle of vengeance before it started, but it is still a strange look for one of “the twelve apostles of Ireland”).
There are other tales of Ciarán’s life which I am leaving out (just as I am leaving out the various monasteries and churches he founded and his episcopal acts), however I will share the story of his death. Ciaran was not beheaded by pagans or crushed by Romans or anything like that–he died from old age surrounded by adoring monks, students, and parishioners (and probably hedgehogs, rabbits, and turtles wearing robes).
ferrebeekeeper 