Another Faraway Auld Lang Syne

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS
GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PAST
Though it is not a holiday piece, there is something about the following story -- maybe it's the foggy weather or the gathering of friends -- that always brings New Year's Eve to mind. Like the Tennessee Williams poem ("The Summer Belvedere") that I posted a few weeks ago, this story by William Saroyan is not easy to locate, so I'll use this fortnight's blog post to pass it on to you.

"The Faraway Night" was first passed on to me thirty years ago by a co-worker, someone I knew for only a short time and never knew well. We never kept in contact; yet, she is memorable to me for adding to my frame of reference this very short story by an author that I had been unfamiliar with until that time. Would I have discovered the story anyway, in some anthology or other, or through some other acquaintance? Perhaps so, but maybe not. I prefer to believe the Fates arranged for our paths to cross so that I might have this sad beautiful story in my life.

The Faraway Night
by William Saroyan
Armenian - American Author, 1908 - 1981
Pulitzer Prize for Drama, 1949
Academy Award for Best Original Story, 1943
This was a day of fog and remembrance of old days and old songs. I sat in the house all afternoon listening to the songs. It was darker everywhere than light and I remembered a song I sang to girl on a bus once. For a while there we were in love, but when the bus reached Topeka she got off and I never saw her again. In the middle of the night when I kissed her she began to cry and I got sick with the sickness of love. That was a young night in August, and I was on my way to New York for the first time in my life. I got sick because I was going my way and she was going hers.

All this day of fog I sat in the house remembering the way a man's life goes one way and all the other lives another, each of them going its own way and a certain number of young people dying all the time. A certain number of them going along and dying. If you don't see them again they are dead even if it is a small world: even if you go back and look for each of them and find them you find them dead because any way any of them go is a way that kills.

The bus came to Topeka and she got off and walked around a corner and I never saw her again. I saw many others, many of them as lovely as she, but never another like her, never another with that sadness and loveliness of voice and never another who wept as she wept. There never will be another with her sadness. There never will be an American night like that again. She herself may be lovelier now than then but there will never be another sadness of night like that and never again will she or anyone else weep that way and no man who kisses her will grow sick with the sickness of the love of that night. All of it belongs to a night in America which is lost and can never be found. All of it belongs to the centuries of small accidents, all trivial, all insignificant, which brought her to the seat beside me, and all the small accidents which placed me there, waiting for her.

She came and sat beside me, and I knew the waiting of all the years had been for her, but when she got off the bus in Topeka I stayed on and three days later I reached New York. That's all that happened except that something of myself is still there in that warm, faraway American night.

When the darkness of day became the darkness of night I put on my hat and left the house. I walked through the fog to the city, my heart following me like a big patient dog, and in the city I found some of the dead who are my friends, and in laughter more deathly and grievous than the bitterest weeping we ate and drank and talked and sang and all that I remembered was the loveliness of her weeping because the years of small accidents had brought us together, and the foolishness of my heart telling me to stay with her and go nowhere, telling me there was nowhere to go.

*******************************
It's that line, "A certain number of young people dying all the time," that cuts straight to the quick. He's right, of course. Some do die young; others just die away from our reality: "If you don't see them again they are dead even if it is a small world."

We are fortunate that the world is smaller these days than it was when Saroyan was writing; with email and facebook, people don't slip away quite so easily. And even without technology, there is still the occasional, good old-fashioned coincidence. It could happen in real life, just as it does in Dan Fogelberg's song "Same Auld Lang Syne," old friends meeting unexpectedly in the grocery store on New Year's Eve, picking up last minute party supplies -- paper hats, balloons, eggs, a bottle of champagne. It could happen.

Happy New Year! Auld Lang Syne!

28 December ~ The Fourth Day of Christmas
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
First Fortnightly Post of the New Year
Friday, January 14, 2011

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
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my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

A Fall Reason, A Winter Reason

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Rustic Porch Lanterns, December Dusk
According to the calendar, it's still autumn; but judging by six inches of snow on the ground, it's definitely winter. I like the way my friend Olynn describes it on her recent facebook post: "One week till first day of winter!! Yea!! Love first day of winter cause as soon as it gets here days start getting longer. Hate first day of summer cause when you are finally ready for lots of warm sunny weather...days start getting shorter." It seems so backward, doesn't it?

Miroslav Holub has written a couple of excellent poems for this transitional time of year. First comes the "yellow foliage" when there are still a few leaves to be seen and then at last the "reddish boniness" when it appears that all is lost.

Fingers of the autumn sun
fiddle with yellow foliage
outside. . . .
this year we are
immersed in history
like a web of light.

Miroslav Holub (1923 - 98)
Czech poet and immunologist
from his poem, "Philosophy of Fall"

Autumn
And it is all over.

No more sweetpeas,
no more wide-eyed bunnies
dropping from the sky.

Only
a reddish boniness
under the sun of hoarfrost,
a thievish fog,
an insipid solution of love,
hate
and crowing.

But next year
larches will try
to make the land full of larches again
and larks will try
to make the land full of larks.

And thrushes will try
to make all the trees sing,
and goldfinches will try
to make all the grass golden,

and burying beetles
with their creaky love will try
to make all the corpses
rise from the dead,

Amen.

Both poems translated by Stuart Friebert and Dana Habova;
in Holub's collection,
Intensive Care: Selected and New Poems, 1996
Even as Holub writes of the year's demise, he anticipates the coming cycle of renewed life, a new generation of sweetpeas, bunnies, thrushes, and beetles. Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 - 1950) looks from the opposite perspective, however, writing in "Sonnet XXXV" that even at the height of summer, she can feel the full weight of love's decline:

If in widening silence you should guess
I read the moment with recording eyes,
Taking your love and all your loveliness
Into a listening body hushed of sighs . . .
Though summer's rife and the warm rose in season,
Rebuke me not: I have a winter reason.

from "Clearly my ruined garden"
in Fatal Interview, 1931

If you have a winter reason, well, now's the time. But keep in mind the larches and the larks! As Olynn observes, just one short week to go before the days start getting longer . . .

Appropriate for any time of year is this beautiful closing thought from Holub's poem "United Flight 412":

" . . . where would we be
if love was not stronger than poetry
and poetry stronger than love?"


The Lanterns, Filled With Snow
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
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my running list of recent reading
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A House Where All's Accustomed, Ceremonious

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUSWho wouldn't want to live in Story, Indiana? Sounds like a place
right out of a book . . . or a place where you could read all the time!

Rustic Hoosier Postcard of Stone Head, Brown County
by photographer Darryl Jones
See also The Spirit of the Place: Indiana Hill Country
As you may have heard me say before, my inspiration for designing this blog came from two writers: Goethe, who hopes that each day might include a song, a poem, some fine art, a few wise words; and Yeats who describes "a house where all's accustomed, ceremonious." This poem, particularly the closing, has been a favorite of mine for many years, decades:

Prayer For My Daughter

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory's wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Helen being chosen found life flat and dull
And later had much trouble from a fool,
While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,
Being fatherless could have her way
Yet chose a bandy-leggèd smith for man.
It's certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful;
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty's very self, has charm made wise,
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there's no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all's accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

William Butler Yeats, 1865 - 1939
Irish poet and dramatist
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1923

The next two poems made their way into my notebook more recently. A few years ago, I discovered Louis Untermeyer's "Prayer For This House" in a poetry anthology that my children brought home from school; and around the same time, a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Family Prayer" was given to me by a neighbor in Philadelphia who told me that her mother read this poem every year before Thanksgiving dinner. Both are similar in tone and purpose to each other, and to Yeats' "Prayer for My Daughter":

Yeats prays for happiness, though "every bellows burst"
Untermeyer - for warmth, "though all the world grow chill"
Stevenson - for loyalty "down to the gates of death"

Yeats invokes "custom" and "ceremony" in the face of howling winds
Untermeyer - faith "to withstand the battering storm"
Stevenson - constancy in "all changes of fortune."

Yeats seeks a refuge from "arrogance and hatred"
Untermeyer - from "the raucous shout" of hate
Stevenson - from peril, tribulation, wrath

Yeats desires reprieve from the scowling face
Untermeyer - from "ill-fortunes," roar and rain
Stevenson - from "the lurking grudge"

Yeats hopes for the triumph of "innocence and beauty"
Untermeyer - for a "shrine" of peace and laughter
Stevenson - for "courage and gaiety and the quiet mind."

May their prayers be answered.

We Give Thanks
Prayer For This House
May nothing evil cross this door.
And may ill-fortunes never pry
about these windows; may the roar
and rains go by.

Strengthened by faith, the rafters will
withstand the battering of the storm.
This hearth, though all the world grow chill
will keep you warm.

Peace shall walk softly through these rooms,
touching your lips with holy wine,
till every casual corner blooms
into a shrine.

Laughter shall drown the raucous shout
and, though the sheltering walls are thin,
may they be strong enough to keep hate out
and hold love in.

Louis Untermeyer, 1885 - 1977
American poet, critic, anthologist
14th United States Poet Laureate, 1961 - 63

Prayers at Breakfast
A Family Prayer
Lord, behold our family here assembled.
We thank you for this place in which we dwell,
for the love that unites us,
for the peace accorded to us this day,
for the hope with which we expect the morrow;
for the health, the work, the food and the bright skies
that make our lives delightful;
for our friends in all parts of the earth.

Let peace abound in our small company.
Purge out of every heart the lurking grudge.
Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere.
Give us the grace to accept and to forgive offenders.
Forgetful ourselves, help us to bear cheerfully
the forgetfulness of others.

Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind.
Spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.
Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors.

If it may not, give us the strength to encounter
that which is to come,
that we be brave in peril, constant in tribulation,
temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune,
and, down to the gates of death,
loyal and loving one to another.

Robert Louis Stevenson 1850 - 1894
Scottish poet and novelist

Now you can store these poems somewhere safe, then take them out to share around the table next Thanksgiving!

Autumn Leaves
All paintings above by
Jessie Willcox Smith, 1863 - 1935
American illustrator of magazines and children's books

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT: www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST: www.kittislist.blogspot.com
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

The Shadowy Feather of an Owl

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

SHADOWY, FEATHERY, CONSTANT:
My Beautiful House Ghost Constance Chauncey

***************
HEXIT
This and all owls below by
American Artist Charley Harper
A list of my "Old Favorites From Way Back" (posted last month on Kitti's List) includes I Heard the Owl Call My Name (by Canadian writer Margaret Craven, 1901 - 1980). This is the story of a terminally ill young vicar, Mark Brian, who spends the last year of his life serving the residents of a remote North American Indian village and becoming familiar with their legend of the revered owl who heralds death: "It was death, reaching out his hand, touching the face gently, even before the owl had called the name" (147). As knowledge of his illness dawns upon him, Mark "heard an owl call--once, and again--and the questions that had been rising all day long reached the door of his mind and opened it." He confides in one of the village elders, "Marta, a strange thing happened tonight. On the banks of the river I heard the owl call my name" (155).

OMNISCIENT OWL
A similar owl, a welcome messenger of release and closure, appears in the following mystical poem by John Haines. The owl in this poem preys upon mice but is friend and silent companion to the narrator. The eerie, prophetic tone is similar to that of "Listening in October" (mentioned recently):

If the Owl Calls Again
at dusk
from the island in the river,
and it's not too cold,

I'll wait for the moon
to rise,
then take wing and glide
to meet him.

We will not speak,
but hooded against the frost
soar above
the alder flats, searching
with tawny eyes.

And then we'll sit
in the shadowy spruce
and pick the bones
of careless mice,

while the long moon drifts
toward Asia
and the river mutters
in its icy bed.

And when the morning climbs
the limbs
we'll part without a sound,

fulfilled, floating
homeward as
the cold world awakens.

poem by John Haines (b. 1924)
American poet and professor
Poet Laureate of Alaska, 1969 - 1973

"If the Owl Calls Again" and "Listening in October" can both be found in The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer: Collected Poems

BETTER MOUSETRAP
In the following poem by Tennessee Williams, the owl appears as an omen of death, leading, at last, not to misfortune but to destiny. The owl is "shadowy" but not sinister. Nearing the end of his struggle with cancer, the narrator anticipates the owl's arrival. I am including this long poem in its entirety, because I'm not sure where else you might find a copy of it. Google yielded no results when I searched for it, so I took a few minutes to type it line by line:

The Summer Belvedere
I
Such icy wounds the city people bear
beneath brown coats enveloping withered members!

I don't want to know of mutilations

nor witness the long-drawn evening debarkation
of warm and liquid cargoes in torn wrappings
the ships of mercy carry back from war.

We live on cliffs above such moaning waters!
Our eyeballs are starred by the vision of burning cities,
our eardrums shattered by cannon.
A blast of the dying,
a thunder of people who cannot catch their breath
is caught in the mortar and molded into the walls.

And I, obsessed with a dread of things corroded,
of rasping faucets, of channels that labor to flow
have no desire to know of morbid tissues,
of cells that begin prodigiously to flower.

There is an hour in which disease will be known
as more than occasion for some dim relative's sorrow.
But still the watcher within my soundless country
assures the pendulum duties of the heart
and asks no reason but keeps a faithful watch

as I keep mine from the height of the belvedere!
And though no eyrie is sacred to wind entirely,

a wall of twigs can build a kind of summer.

II
I asked my kindest friend to guard my sleep.

I said to him, Give me the motionless thicket of summer,
the velvety cul-de-sac, and quiet the drummer.

I said to him, Brush my forehead with a feather,
not with an eagle's feather, nor with a sparrow's,
but with the shadowy feather of an owl.

I said to him, Come to me dressed in a cloak and a cowl,
and bearing a candle whose flame is very still.

Our belvedere looks over a bramble hill.

I said to him, Give me the cool white kernel of summer,
the windless terminal of it, and calm the drummer!

I said to him, Tell the drummer
the rebels have crossed the river and no one is here
but John with the broken drumstick and half-wit Peg
who shot spitballs at the moon from the belvedere.

Tell the feverish drummer no man is here.
But what if he doesn't believe me?
Give him proof!
For there is no lie that contains no part of truth.

And then, with the sort of courage that comes with fever,
the body becoming sticks that blossom with flame,
the flame for a while obscuring what it consumes,
I twisted and craned to peer in the loftier room--

I saw the visitor there, and him I knew
as my waiting ghost.

The belvedere was blue.

III
I said to my kindest friend, The time has come
to hold what is agitated and make it still.

I said to him, Fold your hands upon the drum.

Permit no kind of sudden or sharp disturbance
but move about you constantly, keeping the guard
with fingers whose touch is narcotic, brushing the walls
to quiet the shuddering in them,
drawing your sleeves across the hostile mirrors
and cupping your palms to breathe upon the glass.

After a while anxiety will pass.

The time has come, I said, for purification.

Rub out the lewd inscriptions on the walls,
remove the prisoners' names and maledictions,
for lack of faith has left impurities here,

and whisper faith to the summer belvedere.

Draw back the kites of hysteria from the sky,
those struggling fish draw back from their breathless pool,
and whisper assurances cool
to the watchful corners, and whisper sleep and sleep
along the treads of the stairs, and up the stairwell,

clear to the belvedere, yes, clear up there, where giggling John
stood up in his onionskin of adolescence
to shoot spitballs at the moon from the captain's walk.

And then, at the last, he said, What shall I do?
The sweetest of treasons, I told him. Lean toward my listening ear
and whisper the long word to me,
the longest of all words to me,
the word that divides the sky from the belvedere.

[emphasis added above]

by Tennessee Williams (1911 - 1983)
American Playwright
Twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Twice awarded the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award

BARK EYES: GREAT HORNED OWL
Click to see more Charley Harper
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Sunday, November 28, 2010

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Sweet Basil Evermore

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS
Isabella and the Pot of Basil, 1846
by English Pre-Raphaelite, William Holman Hunt (1827 - 1910)
Stanzas #32 and #53
from Isabella, or the Pot of Basil
by John Keats, English Romantic Poet (1795 - 1821)

In the mid days of autumn, on their eves
The breath of Winter comes from far away,
And the sick west continually bereaves
Of some gold tinge, and plays a roundelay
Of death among the bushes and the leaves,
To make all bare before he dares to stray
From his north cavern. So sweet Isabel
By gradual decay from beauty fell,
Because Lorenzo came not. . . .

And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,
And she forgot the blue above the trees,
And she forgot the dells where waters run,
And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;
She had no knowledge when the day was done,
And the new morn she saw not: but in peace
Hung over her sweet Basil evermore,
And moisten’d it with tears unto the core.

Lorenzo and Isabella, 1849
by English Pre-Raphaelite, John Everett Millais (1829 - 1896)

Isabella and the Pot of Basil, 1879
by English Pre-Raphaelite, John Melhuish Strudwick (1849 - 1937)
Poor Isabella, left with nothing but a pot of fragrant, flourishing basil to show for her devotion to honest Lorenzo. Wrapped in a fine cloth and buried deep within the skull - embellished urn is the severed head of Isabella's murdered lover. Not only do her heartless, jealous brothers kill Lorenzo, but they further deprive their distraught sister of the pot of basil, her only remaining connection to the love of her life, her sole tenuous link to sanity.

In Millais's portrayal of happier times (except for the presence of that grim waiter who appears to be in cahoots with the conniving brothers), the pot of basil can be seen behind the lovers, blooming on the garden wall. In Strudwick's more somber portrayal, you can see the ornate, but empty plant stand to Isabella's left and the evil brothers outside the window, sneaking off with the morbidly treasured pot of basil.

In this poem, Keats veers away from his lush autumnal imagery of "mellow fruitfulness," focusing instead on the death and decay of the season's end. The breath of winter is sickly and bereaved, rendering the landscape as hopeless as Lorenzo's head, as barren as Isabella's heart. A sad story. A beautiful plant (Ocimum basilicum).

Isabella and the Pot of Basil, 1907
by English Pre-Raphaelite, John William Waterhouse (1849 - 1917)O Echo, Echo, from some sombre isle,
Unknown, Lethean, sigh to us - O sigh!
Spirits in grief, lift up your heads . . .
And make a pale light . . .

Sound mournfully upon the winds and low;
For simple Isabel is soon to be
Among the dead
from Stanzas #55 and #56
**************
The esteemed essayist E. B. White (1899 - 1985) writes admiringly of his aging wife sitting in the autumnal garden:

" . . . hour after hour in the wind and weather . . . the small hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection."

from E. B. White's Introduction (xix)
to Onward and Upward in the Garden
by Katharine S. White (1892 - 1977)
long-time fiction editor for the The New Yorker magazine
Plotting the resurrection.

Or to put it another way:

" A garden is evidence of faith.
It links us with all the misty figures of the past who also
planted and were nourished by the fruits of their planting."

~~Gladys Taber~~
American naturalist and columnist (1899 - 1980)
Author of the Stillmeadow Journals
For us as well, the chilly autumn breezes have begun to blow. The basil needs bringing in. Always one of our more successful crops, half will be hung to dry, the other half processed into pesto for freezing. It's thinning now, after several summer cuttings; but here's how it looked back in mid-July:

"Nothing can replace the shock of pleasure
given by a small mountain of fresh basil
in the summer kitchen."

~~Eleanor Perenyi~~
American gardener and writer (1918 - 2009)
Author of Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Sunday, November 14, 2010

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT: "Isabella & the Pot of Basil"
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Capturing the Ginkgo Light

" . . . GOLDEN AND GREEN
LEAVES LITTER THE LAWN TODAY THAT YESTERDAY
HAD SPREAD ALOFT THEIR FLUTTERING FANS OF LIGHT."
~~ HOWARD NEMEROV ~~
Golden paintings, here and above, by Leonard Orr

Artist Leonard Orr says:
"None of my paintings are titled;
most can also be hung in any orientation
(there is no top or bottom, left or right;
I paint turning the painting again and again,
holding it up in the air and tilting the canvases
to let the wet paint flow in different directions;
I have ruined many clothes!)."
Looking at these paintings, I sense the ethereal light of the delicately ribbed, fan-like ginkgo leaf, that changes so suddenly from green to gold. Not only are the colors perfectly autumnal (as in "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness"), but the background textures, so much like a palimpsest, remind me of ancient Chinese calligraphy, fitting right in with the Oriental heritage and folklore of the ginkgo tree. Did the trees thrive naturally or were they planted and preserved for many centuries by Chinese monks who later introduced them to Japan?

I have long been an admirer of the Ginkgo biloba [i.e., bi-lobed], this unique species of tree with no living relatives and leaves like no other. Way back in the Spring of 1972, I pasted ginkgo leaves (found on the Lindenwood campus in St. Charles, Missouri) into the pages of my 9th grade leaf collection.

a page from my scrapbook
38 - year - old ginkgo leaf
page from Goethe's scrapbook
195 - year - old ginkgo leaf
The great Goethe also admired the ginkgo, and preserved yet today in the Goethe Museum in Düsseldorf are the above leaves that he himself dried and attached to his love poem "Ginkgo biloba" in 1815. Of the unusual bi - lobed leaves, Goethe has written:

This leaf from a tree in the East . . .

Does it represent One living creature
Which has divided itself?
Or are these Two, which have decided,
That they should be as One?

Wolfgang Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)
Prolific German writer, poet, scientist, botanist, and philosopher

When living in Philadelphia, many years after my leaf collection, I encountered ginkgos at every turn: there were the stately, historical ginkgos on the grounds of Bartram's Garden, Woodlands Cemetery, and University City New School; the middle-aged ginkgos lining Lancaster Avenue; and the younger generation, visible from every window on the south side of our house.

Two Proud Ginkgos on Beaumont Avenue, Philadelphia
Not long ago I mentioned an old childhood classic, The Witch Family on my book blog. This little novel ~~ also an October favorite for Halloween ~~ contains the following descriptive ginkgo passage, which I can appreciate even more, now that I have lived in a tall brick city house, just like Amy's:

"Amy's house was a high red brick one. In front of it there was a tall and graceful ginkgo tree whose roots made the worn red bricks of the sidewalk bulge and whose branches fanned the sky. The ginkgo tree has little leaves shaped like fans that Amy and Clarissa liked to press and give to their dolls. The fruit of this tree is orange, but it is not good for eating. It has an odd fragrance that grownups do not like but that children do not mind, for it makes them think of fall and Halloween" (14, The Witch Family, Eleanor Estes).

Poet Eve Merriam also pays tribute to the urban ginkgo, in "Willow and Ginkgo," her poem of comparison and contrast:

"The ginkgo forces its way through gray concrete;
Like a city child, it grows up in the street.
Thrust against the metal sky,
Somehow it survives and even thrives.
My eyes feast upon the willow,
But my heart goes to the ginkgo."

by Eve Merriam (1916 - 1992)
American Poet
Winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, 1946

City Children
(Ben at the wheel / Sam, back seat driver)
Fallen Ginkgo Fruit [seeds, actually]
Photo from Wikimedia Commons
As little Amy observes, the large fleshy seed is indeed malodorous and not well-liked, certainly not something that you want to inadvertently squash and carry into the house on the bottom of your shoe! However, if you can live and let live, the plump, pungent little nuisance has its own peculiar charm and is not all that hard to abide. A common Chinese name for the ginkgo tree elevates the fruity seed to an object of beauty, translating poetically into English as Silver Apricot. How lovely!

In his mystical sonnet, "The Consent," American poet Howard Nemerov writes in wonderment of the quickly turning Ginkgos:

. . . on a single night
Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees
That stand along the walk drop all their leaves
In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind
But as though to time alone: the golden and green
Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday
Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light.

by Howard Nemerov (1920 - 1991)
American Poet
1978 Pulitzer Prize Winner

Another tribute to the tenacity and longevity of the ginkgo is Arthur Sze's seven - part, evocative poem about existence and endurance, "The Ginkgo Light." Inspired by the half dozen noble ginkgo trees to survive the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Sze writes:

A 1300-year-old lotus seed germinates; a ginkgo
issues fan-shaped leaves; each hour teems. . . .

love has no near or far

. . . a temple in Hiroshima . . .
disintegrates, while it's ginkgo

buds after the blast. . . .

As light skews across our faces, we are
momentarily blinded, and, directionless,

have every which way to go. . . .

and while we listen to our exhale, inhale,
ephemera become more enduring than concrete.

Ginkgos flare out. . . .

One brisk morning,
we snap to layers of overlapping

fanned leaves scattered on the sidewalk . . .
finger a scar on wrist, scar on abdomen.

by Arthur Sze, Chinese American poet (b. 1950)
from his book The Ginkgo Light


Goethe, Estes, Merriam, Nemerov, Sze -- what do all these writers have in common? Their hearts go out to the ginkgo, the tree of the ages; and so do ours. No wonder paleobotanist Albert Seward once said that the ginkgo "appeals to the historic soul: we see it as an emblem of changelessness, a heritage from worlds too remote for our human intelligence to grasp, a tree which has in its keeping the secrets of the immeasurable past" (British botanist and geologist, 1863 - 1941).

Additional links for more information on this fascinating tree:

Ginkgo biloba

Ginkgo history

FYI: The standard spelling appears to be GINKGO (with the "k" before the final "g"); but most dictionaries allow -- in fact practically encourage! -- use of the alternative GINGKO (with the second "g" before the "k"). You pick! See dictionary.com

Archived posts for further reading:
29 November 2009: Ginkgo Biloba
3 December 2009: Willow and Ginkgo

And there's always
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts

Next Fortnightly Post Topic:
Basil:Ocimum basilicum
Coming Thursday, October 28, 2010
See you then!