mercredi 4 juin 2003

The cat, the garden gallery and the kid Recent news from the wildcat inspires, hence the perplexity I expressed yesterday, no fewer than three floral tangents. First, wormwood. The absinthe held to be stock in trade of many, particularly French, poets and painters (semi-commercial site) is one expression of a plant held to symbolize the "separation and torment of love". This is appropriate to the manifold aspects of an increasingly thorny state of affairs. To say more would be a grave disservice to "my" wildcat, but it came to me in the night that a meditation on some decisions in the bud was taking me down a path easier weblogged than half-heartedly e-mailed... Wormwood also features in a voluminous "Modern Herbal". The adjective may be taken with a pinch of salt, given that Mrs. M. Grieve's considerable work was first published, as its online editor judiciously reminds us, in 1931. Also out in the garden, I found Duncan Long, a man after a part of my own heart when it comes to much of his substantial graphic output, music and tales. It's Duncan's 'Wormwood Falls' I have stolen here, in the hope that his well-maintained corner of the Web may please others too. zzz Next comes the humble but courageous snowdrop, painted here, rather than photographed as would seem to be his custom, by Dutch-born Albert Koetsier. Koetsier is among 16 artists featured online by the Susan Spiritus gallery (Newport Beach, California). Tradition accords the snowdrop the qualities of both hope and consolation. In light of the tidings from afar, both the wildcat and I are going to need such qualities in the weeks and months to come. For all her absence from my side, so present is she in my heart, mind and dreams that ... well, maybe I should go with the intuition I had since even before we first met face to face. Maybe a simple weekend question from Marianne meant the youngster really has glimpsed something I've begun to suspect, though if the notion has ever seriously crossed your own mind, I don't doubt you've knocked it right back into some parallel universe. "Snowdrop, usually spoken of as the first flower of our year, though the Winter Aconite has perhaps a better title to be so considered, has never been of much account in physic,..." says Mrs. Grieve, before her further investigations found that an "old glossary of 1465, referring to it as Leucis i viola alba, classes it as an emmenagogue, and elsewhere, placed under the narcissi, its healing properties are stated to be 'digestive, resolutive and consolidante'." zzz Symbol of "adversity", the wallflower, has a second "meaning", nothing to do with the girl left out of the dance; or with this picture lifted from Michigan photographer Jim Riegel's "reaction to the phony 'Playboy' nudes or the 'Cutesie' nudes you see in commercial art galleries" (should it please you, Jim's other pages also merit the detour). My whirlwind of a wildcat has never been one to find herself "on the shelf". Even where adversity has been a part of her lot, I dare start to divine the "dark side" in some of the men who have been drawn into the storm. But for all the passion in her, events can conspire to leave her a solitary creature. A mounting fear of the night should be no part of the nature of cats! It's not what you see in the dark, my darling; new tides in your fortunes strike me as part of the process of discovering how to master such visitors. "Nightmares," you've called them. But admit it: you're usually quick enough when it comes to making sense of the ones that may matter. Sometimes I hear you pacing bare floorboards, however poor the line in those occasional late-night calls, but where you walk, there's no stairway to heaven (detail from 'Wallflower' by Derek Shorts. Derek engages in a wide range of computer graphics, "really [has] blue hair", and recently finished 10 years as a US expat in Germany for PDI/Dreamworks and 'Shrek 2'.) I too would be afraid to lie alone in the dark when the only visible door opens into a kind of enfer and each week brings a further closing in of the walls. But the latest twists of "fate", heart-bandit, while probably destined to keep you very distant from me for even longer than I had begun to accept, could yet bring the new dimension you're seeking. Trust me, at least, on that... While I shall not reveal what the wildcat worked in the last dreams she mentioned, safe to recount that one of my rudest recent awakenings was into this little nest beneath the eaves from - in all truth - an "expanding room" we were learning to share. Yesterday? The day before? I lose track of time. Space is but a part of what she needs, always has, always will. Just as long as she has a place to "come home". Sometimes, darling, you remind me of Carmen (my favourite recording, if an "old" one), not that I see you coming to the same end! You just need to run with the wolves. And I too need space. We're not all like this, you know (but I can't resist pinching the - uncredited - picture from the Valar Guild and their Tolkien Encyclopaedia, since any J.R.R. T. fan who may have chanced down this far will find it a treasure hoard of a site). I'll tell you who finally told me, quick as lightning, where my animal affinities lie, but not in public. I wouldn't want to embarrass her. As to yours. One day you said, "What you're describing is a cat!" Yes, that was the easy bit. The unexpected find and the certainty with it came just a short while ago: call it serendipity. zzz Shall the wolf lie with the leopard? It's an unlikely prospect, my darling, but Marianne believes so already. Perhaps more than I do... Certainly more than you do! Katherine Nelson, from whom I have pilfered a more likely picture of my own place in the clouds, keeps a rather lovely gallery of her own: Ancient Messages (or Peyote Wallpaper - with the warning that many files on part of her site "are very large, and those of you on dial-up connections may very well end up cursing my name forevermore.") Ms Nelson, also illustrated by a detail from the fuller picture, has a taste for shamanism, things comic, including her own. Her pleasingly "irrational dislikes include fantasy novels, all-girl folk music and small yappy dogs." Yes, those of the kind my foot can scarcely resist the impulse to treat as footballs, especially when almost tripped over on Parisian pavements. Katherine maintains a journal, where one of her latest (on June 1) "moods" was "weird". And her listening: 'Cake - "I will survive". As will you, my wildcat. As shall I... Today, I'm relieved to see that I'm in Ms Nelson's good company when it comes to a "cryptic entry"! Of your "beastly guardian", I wish whoever snapped this shot somewhere in southern Africa had also taken the well-merited credit for it. All I know is that the photographer would seem to live in the Netherlands. And should perhaps be introduced online to that brother of mine, whose own shot is quite a credit to his patience (Alex's Afrikeye galleries are, he says, undergoing an overhaul). One look at that and it's clear enough where the speed of the wind comes from! As well as the resilience most other people may characterise in you, darling, thus perhaps blinding themselves to other qualities it can sometimes prove less convenient for them to see. What's really hard, often enough, is to discover how to tap the source. Or as the already quoted Tippett expressed it (but I shall give a little more here): "The words of wisdom are these: Winter cold means inner warmth, the secret mystery of the seed. How shall we have patience for the consummation of the mystery? Who will comfort us in the going through? Patience is born in the tension of loneliness. The garden lies beyond the desert. (...) I would know my shadow and my light, so shall I at last be whole. Then courage, brother, dare the grave passage. Here is no final grieving, but an abiding hope. The moving waters renew the earth. It is spring." zzz Adversity? Before you should pounce on what I've "forgotten", see that I have yet to lose the thread: for the second "significance" of the wallflower is "friendship". And that's what counts today, isn't it? The warmth in the night. The outstretched hand and the ear that really listens. You know it's friendship that's on offer this end of the network; let's leave love out of it for a moment - a point on which Marianne would disagree, but then she is just 14 and another of the world's dreamers! What she thinks can wait till the end.;) Of course I miss you! After all, you did rouse my own need for the warmth of a body in the night from the place I had buried it for a good long while. Wolves and leopards may hunt alone, but to the best of my knowledge, they don't sleep alone. But hard though sometimes it is, there are one or two things in life that are really worth the patience and you're one of them in mine. And that, my wildcat, holds true even when you accuse me of being "harsh". Or whatever. Accusations I'll generally accept, moreover, since they're true! Trouble is, I know your travels are far from over. That I can live with. Just as long as wherever you are - and once this much has been said - you'll let me return to the rather more important business of drying a few tears and helping bring back that laugh I haven't heard in rather too long now... Where anybody else is concerned, wallflowers have a whole Gallery of their own in Miami. With becoming modesty, the artists there consider the place "the most unique cultural environment of any venue of its kind in South Florida". Well. Some of the things to be found there are of the sort I'd walk straight past before realising that you were still standing "outside the shop". Mrs. Grieve? Well, she has little to say about wallflowers, though her editor points outs that "a tincture of the whole plant has been found useful in the effects of cutting the wisdom tooth." Something I should remember if ever it comes to the day I have deliberately postponed since the dentist showed me, many years ago, the X-ray of the one that's growing sideways. He wants it out. I don't. I may be getting long in the tooth, but have precious little wisdom to spare. Anyway. I'm also done. Perhaps Donovan is much better at Speaking Cat than I am. I also found Donovan's Place by accident. Looking for wallflowers. And ended up with a 'Self-Portrait' as well. One which, to my eye, befits the current cycle of circumstances. OK. Now I'll tell you what Marianne said at the weekend. Even if it means you won't speak to her, or to me, for at least a month... She asked about the wedding. Sorry, darling, but she did. Who was I to disabuse her? Well. I did. A little bit. More than a little bit. Quite a big little bit. I told her that it wouldn't be for months. At least. Perhaps years. Probably never. "That's okay," Marianne said. "Can I wear black?" Dream on, kid. I know you've just got my best interests at heart. Come the year you - the leopard - do feel like snarling at me again, I hope they'll still be waiting in the Marais. Because this time, once we've bought those shoes, I'll make sure you even finish your food. Better run now. Though I'm nervous that the leopard can fast outpace the wolf. Hmm. Now there'd be an interesting match fight! 8:36:29 PM  link   your views? [] 'Ventus': probing fine-grained frontiers Picture yourself somewhere rather like the late Middle Ages: the twilight age of some feudal society where a queen can still rule with great power from a fortress palace, while forests are wild places ruled in their turn by superstition and fears, best left to themselves in the night. Roads are rough, and since horses, carts and carriages, and human feet remain the most common ways of getting around, travellers' tales are rare treasures. Now, think heresy. A frontier heresy against one aspect of science currently still in its infancy, but already bestirring the legislators of "developed" nations in this world of our own. Nanotechnology. In the centuries ahead of us, scientific designers will live in equally uncertain times as those neo-mediaeval village communities sheltered by their manors and townsmen behind their fortified walls. Karl does the writing. I make the judicious, but minor, cut or two to avoid "spoilers": '(The designers) did not feel they could rely on civilisation to preserve human knowledge; with their recent experience of nuclear wars, Marya supposed that was a reasonable fear. She had been taught that (...) artificial intelligences were designed as distributed nanotech in order to make it impossible to destroy the information they carried, short of incinerating the entire planet. It was obvious to her now that if the (...) design team had the technical means to create these consciousnesses, then they were thinking in terms of taking the functions of perception, investigation and organization out of the human body and placing them in "inanimate" objects. Commonplace in Marya's time, such an idea was closely associated with thalience in theirs. They denied the connection -- successfully, too. Their object, they claimed, was to actually create the metaphysical categories, as real things. They said they were going to embed the official view of science in nature itself (...). Wolfgang Krieger, the team leader, said, "Science has no way to show or access the metaphysical essences supposed to lie behind appearances. If these essences do not exist in themselves, we will create them." The understanding was that they would be creating them in the image of scientific truth. But what if, for whatever reason, the designers were to uncouple the nano from the requirement that it use human semantic categories? What if the real agenda was to let the (...) intelligences develop their own conceptual languages? Theorists as early as Chomsky had suggested that languages can exist that humans cannot even in principle understand. Perhaps they didn't plan for it to happen, but the Winds appeared to have developed such a language. All it would take would be for one of the programmers to slip a thalience gene into the Winds' design.' Thalience? Yes, and there's 'Mediation' too. There are Heaven Hooks, desals, morphs and Diadem swans. But if this intrigues you, then best I leave you to unravel the rest. As for Marya, an anthropologist, she has riddled out but a one part of a far greater mystery. Poor Marianne. Since I read her an early chunk of 'Ventus,' she's been pleading with me to tell her the whole of Karl Schroeder's story. All of it, darling? From the swordfights and sieges to the distant, powerful Archipelago conceived around a planet we know today as 'Earth'? Just how many hours do we have? What my daughter enjoyed, first, included a burial: 'The hillside rose steeply, blocking the stars. The torches lit a deep cut in its side, where a bare rock face had been smoothed, maybe centuries ago. Deep letters were carved over a slotted doorway uncovered by a huge stone slab. The slab had been tilted to the side and now leaned heavily on a scaffold made from catapult parts. Rough soldiers sat on the scaffold, passing bottles back and forth. They watched impassively as he passed under them. Another sky drew overhead, this one of yellow stone. The ceiling was centimeters away. The deeply pitted sandstone was painted in abstract clouds of gray and black by the passage of many torches. The smoke from those burning now swirled up and around him, settling into a layer of trembling heat. Around a corner, and now he was being carried down a steep flight of steps. His bearers spoke back and forth as they lowered him carefully. Ten meters down, then twenty, into a region of dead air and penetrating cold where squat pillared halls led away to either side. His bearers moved more quickly now, and the torchlight flickered off an uneven ceiling and dark niches in the wall where objects, long or round, were piled. He was lowered to the floor in front of a black opening and unceremoniously slid in. The ceiling here was just above his nose. Bricks thudded down behind his head. What little light there was disappeared, and of sound, only that of stones being mortared into position. After a few minutes, even that ceased. There had been no name carved above the niche. So, after a while, he raised one hand, slid it across his opened chest, knuckles scraping the stone, and felt behind his head. There, in a band of moist mortar, he wrote the word: Armiger. JORDAN SAT UP screaming. Calandria was at his side instantly, holding his shoulders while he shuddered. "What is it? A dream?" "Him, him again -- I saw him . . ." He seemed not to know where he was. "Saw who?" "Armiger!" Calandria lowered him back onto his bedroll, and when he closed his eyes and drifted off again, she smiled.' Even better than the burial and Jordan's "dreams", however, was where the elderly grave-robber Enneas and his young assistants (as scared as Marianne) pay a visit to General Armiger's niche. Not all of them live to regret it. Who is Armiger? Then again, perhaps the question should be, 'What is Armiger?' And as the back jacket asks: "...why have the Winds fallen silent? And is Armiger, or Jordan, carrying a Resurrection Seed?" Never judge a book by its cover. Had I done that, Alan Pollack's design on this edition would have discouraged me. Sorry, Alan, just a matter of taste. For me it doesn't "fit" the story. No, the reason I almost invariably blog about books I've enjoyed is because I've heard or read enough about them to know, in advance, they'll be right up one of my streets. Since I've twice linked to other people's 'Ventus' reviews already, today I take another tack and let Schroeder speak largely for himself. If that doesn't turn you on, nothing will. 'Ventus' is a magnificent achievement, in which Karl steadily introduces a rich range of well-developed characters, human and otherwise, as he builds from a relatively simple foundation to shape a whole host of mysteries. A Canadian, he writes with grace and style enough to slip from one genre to another with a confounding ease which renders any bid to pigeon-hole 'Ventus' most satisfyingly pointless. Ideas abound, but never get in the way of a plot which grabs you by the guts as well as stimulating the mind. The words of the 'Desert Voice' I quoted last month are among several passages haunt me (particularly when I have a wildcat rarely very far from my thoughts.*) "I understand now that each human has a ruling passion, one that serves as a fountainhead from which flow all semblances of happiness, sadness, anger and joy," was part of what the starship said. A starship ready for death once her mission has been fulfilled, her own story told. Except that the 'Voice' is not allowed to die, for a reason integral to an optimistic vision of a capacity for change on the part of sentient "life-forms" crucial to Schroeder's dénouement. Even that ending gets things just right. Karl succeeds in telling you what you wanted to know of the outcome for characters who win your affections, while leaving just enough open to the imagination and intellect to fuel some interesting further speculations. And I'll end this review with the quote for our nanotech concerned times (Beeb news story with some good links) which serves as keynote "frontispiece" to Karl's saga: "...Frankenstein's monster speaks: the computer. But where are its words coming from? Is the wisdom on its cold lips our own, merely repeated at our request? Or is it something else speaking? --A voice we have always dreamed of hearing?" from the The Successor to Science Marjorie Cadille, March 2076 'Permanence', Karl's newest born after 'Ventus', came out in 2002, has joined my list of must reads, and is up for an Aurora Award this year. But Karl has another newborn to keep his family busy right now. Paige Jody Nicole first saw daylight on March 17. Congratulations! How do I know this? Simple really, since the man keeps his own log, and not one afflicted by any false modesty ;). Oh. Marianne won't have to worry about English beyond her grasp. Not with 'Ventus' available now since last June in French. And sorry to hammer on so, but I do prefer the covers on the Denoël editions. ___________ "Irrelevant" footnote: Were this so, there are moments I could conceive of my wildcat's "fuel" as anger itself. Yet I know this not to be so; anger is but one expression of her essential fire, one I best understand in my ... dreams. Yes, I know. You're expecting mail, my love. But that's not how it's going to be. What I want, or is it "need", to say will be going up right here a while after lunch. When I woke up this morning, I realised that there are too many "links" for a letter. And that Marianne might be wiser than both of us. ;) 2:03:57 PM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.