Blog Posts

Noticing Trees Grow

3/28/2020

I’ve been blogging for a few years now with a seasonal emphasis and not very much consideration of longer spans of time. Recently, while shoving a wheelbarrow along, I noticed how large the trees are becoming on the little ridge behind our garden. It has taken years. Perhaps I could learn how to triangulate and figure out just how much higher they are than when we moved here 22 years ago. But I’m too busy for anything that intellectual.

Winter is the time for hardscaping in the garden. But tasks involving stock and stone take a lot of time, and have stages, and very seldom seem to be finished when spring arrives and the weeds pour out. The ground has to be prepared for planting in the vegetable garden and annual beds. The lily beds, roses and irises have to be cleared and encouraged. When it’s time to clear the beds of weeds and rake the winter debris out, the job can’t be put off or you’ll soon have a nightmare on your hands.

Many people who sort of want to garden are knocked out of the racket altogether by the inevitable conflux of spring work. I regularly stop and run my muddy fingers through my sweat-dripping hair and ask if what I go through is really worth it or not. But life itself is mostly a bargain. You can fill in the blanks in the following sentence in countless ways: “If you want to have _____ then you have to _____.” I find that I do want irises and lilies. To keep us working for delayed gratifications, a garden needs all-season reminders of why we do it. Because, believe me, I wake up stiff and sore every day. Today, March 23, as I write this, it is cold again and raining, so I’m only going to go out once and take a few pictures.

Camellia “Black Prince”— A much deeper red than this back-lit snapshot shows.

And yet, so nice I photographed it twice. Note weeds in foreground.

Returning tulips and returning weeds -- Weeds about to be pulled.

Nature is generous—everybody gets weeds. Weeds are there to remind us that gardening is contrary to the inclinations of nature. Of course some people like weeding. It is a mindful task requiring concentration, dexterity and thoroughness. There are tools to help. Weeding is also an excellent way to appreciate the loveliness and vegetal interest of so many of the weeds themselves. Weeding is one of the more Zen activities in gardening. Don’t worry about wiping the weeds out. You’ll be seeing them again.

The background in the tulip photo above shows three of our worst Central Virginia weeds: spindleshanks, grannyspackle, and plaguewort. Faintly visible in the upper right corner of the photo is a Scotch thistle, a noxious weed in most contexts. I think it might even be illegal to grow in Washington State. But butterflies love it and I generally allow one to survive so I can look at it eye to eye in summer when they grow to be my height.

However, I digress. This blog post was intended to be about work in the garden, especially the confluence of hardscaping and early spring garden bed prep. I finished some of the winter hardscaping, for instance the finished corner in the photo below. Some of the winter hardscaping is still desperately underway. I say desperately, because the time available shrinks in the face of pruning and weeding demands that cannot be put off.

A finished corner.

An unfinished gate is just an eyesore.

Gates and fences are a huge source of hardscaping work. The symbolic visual value of gates is a major thing not always taken seriously enough, but far more vital in Central Virginia is the fence, because we are overrun with deer. Not the little deer of Miyajima and Nara, but the big whitetail deer of Hell, which will eat ornamentals and gardens until there is nothing left. Deer live in our yard, herds of up to eleven or twelve at a time seasonally, and they would wipe our entire garden out in a day if there were no fence. We love the deer, but a deer fence is vital.

There are plants that deer won’t eat, a longish list including daffodils, narcissus, spirea, and peonies. A couple of days ago I planted a new peony bed, which looks small but required the removal of three wheelbarrows of dirt to accommodate five promising new peonies, a Christmas gift from Alex and family that just arrived from White Flowers Farm.

Peony root, “Eden’s Perfume”, sitting in a five-gallon bucket waiting to be planted.

In addition to flowers, we’ve got a vegetable garden which we started in 2014 and have added to every year since. This will be our seventh year tending the raised beds of our vegetable garden. The food value, in quality and volume, has been phenomenal. We still have a few squash and a good number of sweet potatoes that we harvested last September and October sitting on the shelves, and have not quite wiped out the tomatoes Karen froze last summer. We also have one jar of black raspberry preserves left, and it is refreshing to think the raspberry bushes will be fruiting again in only six to eight more weeks. And we are harvesting now, collards and kale planted last October.

Karen planting onions.

Thriving kale.

Siberian kale—so sweetly flavorful, and dig the cool red stems!

The vegetable garden is clearly the most work, compared to ornamental gardening. It’s a really good feeling to go out in the wet, windy chills of March and collect succulent and mouth-watering things and bring them into the house and eat them. To really make the truck garden yield up its produce, you need to have a dedicated gardener, and the master (mistress?) of this garden is Karen.

Karen saying “Don’t take my picture.”

I can’t speak for Karen, but the only possible way I’ve found to garden, taking into account all my natural limitations, is to do several things at once. If I set out to do any one thing, I will not actually finish unless it’s a very small thing indeed. The method that works for me involves staging the work of the season as sets of very large tasks to be nibbled at for days, weeks or even months.

Planned work, such as garden enlargements, rock features, paving and new flower beds, take up the most time and thought. These are the schemes one lies in bed thinking about at night, and they cause back-bending amounts of digging, hewing and carrying. Scheme-work has to be set aside regularly for the essential and the timely work that absolutely has to be done, first and in place of other tasks, to prevent nature from taking the garden back.

Then there is a particularly recherché category of work, generally neglected in the garden literature: managing the material consequences of one's own efforts. Pulled weeds have to be piled on the mulch heap, dirt on the dirt heap, scattered tools and implements have to be collected, things have to be stored. There may be transplants awaiting reburial, extra rocks set aside that will never walk to a better place by themselves, plant supports stacked “out of the way” in November that are now “in the way” in March. There is no convenient time for this sort of little task. Indeed the little tasks outweigh the huge tasks. Half a bucket of decayed saprolite—the chemically weathered rock working its way up from the subsoil—more usually defined as some kind of rock that lives in the local dirt—now there’s an easy bucket to set aside. Then it has to be moved again. Somehow, hopping buckets and barrows, tools and debris across the work site turns out to be most of what gardening is, physically.

As for me, I’m in it for the rocks.

The last crocuses of spring.

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Reese Macaque's newest adventure - "President Nero’s Golden Palace"

10/16/2019

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I am delighted to share my news that the first story in The Casebook of Reese Macaque, PI, the sequel to my sci-fi detective fantasy, The Adventures of Reese Macaque, Private Investigator, is now up on Amazon Kindle.

The Macaque tales are science fiction detective stories. Detective stories are generally tales of manners. A science fiction detective story is about social manners in a future world. In the case of this story, the society in question is descended from ours.

The first collection of Macaque detective stories took several years to write. From the first I had no doubt that the Macaque stories were a fantasy, specifically a nonsense fantasy not unrelated to Edward Lear’s The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World or John Collier’s His Monkey Wife, which was first published in 1930 and is still in print. Of course nonsense is a very serious business and I cannot emphasize that enough.

It took some time before I realized that Macaque was science fiction as well. At first the world of Reese Macaque seemed unlikely to be an accurate or literal description of the future, though it certainly felt like a possible one. But eventually I began to suspect that these little tales of mystery and detection were set in a more-than-probable future world—a world we may in fact be hard pressed to avoid. Macaque seems to be on the road to actuality after all.

I must thank Rhesus A. Macaque’s co-creator, my son Edward. In an act of imagination, or maybe just mundane psychic prescience, Edward envisioned and began to flesh out the world of Reese Macaque. Ted and I are its first citizens and in the years to come Macaque’s world may seem less like fantasy.

Click here to access The Adventures of Reese Macaque, Private Investigator on amazon.com.

Click here to access Reese's newest adventure, President Nero's Golden Palace.

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Lily Season Ends -- And Leads to Reflection

8/13/2019

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In my last blog post, I described the beginning of another garden in an old field in Covesville. Squash and corn promptly sprouted.

Heirloom squash

Corn: Stage 1

To a garden, dirt, heat and rain are serious matters. Heat and humidity drive cycles of sometimes-violent electrical storms. The amount of water they dump is unpredictable, from a sprinkle to a “frog drownder”, as we used to call them. Drought and sudden flood are serious threats, along with insects and plant disease. We plant a variety of vegetables in our garden. Every year we lose a few varieties. Suppose a person lived on what they grew—what would loss of a year’s crop entail? It’s something to think about. As I mentioned in my last post, the new garden has helped me understand Rockfish, my own book, better.

The results of the new field garden continue to be interesting. I assumed the germination rate would be low. It’s not. Don and I planted this garden as an afterthought; we’d both long since started our usual gardens and did not plant this field until the end of June/beginning of July. At the time of writing July is drawing to a close and everything is up. The germination rate was 90%. The new plants are racing to catch up with the season. There have been plenty of thunderstorms and the clay field soil drains very slowly. So far, water has not been a problem in the field.

Corn: Stage 2

A long row of pumpkins and gourds in a sea of healthy weeds

One thing is clear: vegetables love this soil, stony clay or not. As the photos show, weeds also thrill to this disturbed soil. To keep a field this size weed-free without using poisons would require countless hours of hoeing, and we don’t have the time. Don and I each have another garden to tend. So we have to tolerate some weeds, cut the weeds back as time permits, and reflect again on the sheer amount of hard manual labor required by just one field—really, just part of one field, since the tilled area is less than half an acre and only a quarter of the entire field. To tend several acres like this, as a Rockfish farmer would have done historically, would have required all the daylight hours available, even with the assistance of draft animals and a couple of grown men to help. Old-fashioned non-toxic farming was not, and is not now, a job for a lazy person. The commitment required to produce the old 19th-century results would have been near absolute.

“I Pay for All” (Wikipedia Commons)

Vegetable gardening is interesting and fun, but my first love is flower gardening. Flowers are easier. Diseases, predators, water, sunlight, temperature take their toll, but we aren’t asking very much from flowers, compared to vegetables. The flower gardener is asking only for a view. The view can be spectacular; the big species lilies we grow are floral dreadnaughts, ships of the line loaded with pollen, dripping with scented fluids, hanging out in groves splendid with insect-attracting colors.

A tuxedo wasp investigating an oriental lily

A vegetable garden particularly singles out edible plants for food production. Leaf-eating beetles and bugs also love exactly that kind of plant. Many garden florals have not been altered to the same degree as vegetables have been by breeding. With obvious exceptions like roses, florals are more tolerant of their surroundings and less likely to be skinned by insects. Just for the interest of the thing, one would ideally want both kinds of gardens.

Sun, heat and humidity, soil, rain and night

There are no simple ingredients in a garden. Everything that comes into the visible world is a phenomenon from an invisible world, where our deliberate interventions are like hammer blows on a Swiss watch as we single out particular garden plants. The weeds wait in the background, clustering around the periphery, looking in through the fence, watching us “fix the watch.” At least that’s what it feels like for me.

Ripeness is all

My last post, with its afterthoughts on Rockfish, led me to some reflections on another of my novels, The Southern Skylark.

The Southern Skylark uses the picaresque formula of late 18th century novels, where a string of absurd and ironic episodes leads to a questionable moral of some kind at the end. My narrator, Mr. Hingely, who provides the novel's point of view, is a relentlessly British gentleman, educated, not rich, but well enough off to turn himself loose in the world, and is enamoured of the Romantic poets. He comes to America by mischance in the 1830s and immediately discovers 19th-century American slavery. He responds with disgust, curiosity and confusion. Even as a kind of early tourist, he is inescapably morally entrapped by even incidental contact with the sheer evil of the slave system.

Stories about wealth seem most often framed from above, the point of view being that of the wealthy, or from below, the poorer ranks of society. It may be that telling a story from the poverty perspective is generally easier for writers, for whom the topic hits close to the mark. The choice of an extremely simple novel form, told from a middling point of view by a single narrator, coming from outside the culture, seemed best for approaching race and slavery, two of the most radioactive subjects in American culture.

The episodic novels of the late 18th century were comedies, even when the hero was hung at the end. The Southern Skylark borrows from that tradition. It’s a comedy, albeit a serious one. Other inspirations include Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, the comic stories of Charles Farrar Browne writing as Artemus Ward, and not least Edgar Allen Poe.

Oddity lends itself to humor, and the sheer oddness of Virginia in the 1830s is not easy to exaggerate. Virginia in the last heyday of slavery was technologically and scientifically little more developed than ancient Rome in many ways, despite the recent introduction of steam power from Great Britain. The match had just been invented, which made cigars much easier to smoke, but matches had to be imported. The society of the slaveholders was content with a technological and intellectual culture not much more subtle or advanced than the culture of the Caesars. The 19th Century had gunpowder, but the ancient Romans had better civil engineering, architecture and plumbing.

It seems that most slaveholders, slaves and non-slaveholders caught in the web of post-colonial Virginia civilization may well have been inured to the harshness of the slave system. They were no more self-reflexive generally than people are today in our civilization. Every class of person—slaves, slaveholders, family farmers, tenants, governors, doctors and lawyers—was built into the institutional wall. Tremendous imagination was necessary to escape the limitations of the age.

The intelligent citizens of Virginia in the 1830s knew that a society whose wealth was built on slavery could be compared to the needle of a precipice—no way off but down. Theirs was a wholly anachronistic world where flashes of medievalism seemed almost like progress, a horrific wonderland whose citizens still keenly felt the sense of an American destiny passed down just a generation before from the Founding Fathers. In 2019 we are still surrounded by the American rhetoric of this world, with its paradoxes of liberty and subjection. In particular, we are still living its race rhetoric. This needs to be written about, and thus The Southern Skylark.

Mr. Hingely’s Romantic Poets fell in well with this world, where individuals were sometimes forced to choose between irony or insanity, or perhaps inherited both. The poetry of Keats, Shelley and Byron offered a dream of release from the physical, the mundane and the laws of mankind. Likewise, emotion and imagination were balm for the slaveholder’s soul. The native Southern literature of the period was even soppier and more hysterically romantic than the nearest British or European examples.

The familiar pangs of the human emotions have probably never changed. They go all the way back. Emotions are always modern. However, in writing about the past, I try to recognize that the “feelings” of the people of the past were not exactly the same as ours. Feelings are not the same thing as emotions; human feelings are partly built up from social understandings, and include a mélange of routine expectations peculiar to time and place and tribe. This should be an obvious point.

The subjectivity of bygone historical time is fairly impossible to capture. Nonetheless, there are splendid reasons to try. People are still being killed today by the cultural aftermath of American slavery. There are things we need to know. An enormous amount of primary material from 1830s Virginia exists, especially newspapers. Over the last century and a half, generations of scholars have steadily produced history and interpretation of the economics and politics of the era. The Southern Skylark offers a novelist's attempt to understand and interpret.

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Three Days in the Garden in Early July

7/21/2019

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My last post focused more or less on the sheer hard work of gardening. Summer in Central Virginia is normally hot and humid. The temperature easily reaches the high 90s F and feels ten degrees hotter; it's roughly as humid as a jungle. By 10 A.M. the ironies of dehydration while soaking wet start to combine with the odds of sunstroke. My new cement steps, pictured below, reveal only slow progress.

A Project: Early Crude Stage

The bottom line about work in an outdoor space is that sometimes you just have to let it go. You can take a few minutes off and notice the results of last year’s work instead.

Last Year’s Work

Phlox planted last year

This year’s exceptional display of lilies reminded me of an old World War One song I haven’t heard in ages: “I’d Like to See the Kaiser with a Lily in His Hand.” The refrain goes:

I’d like to see all mothers free from sorrow
I’d like to see poor Belgium free from pain
I’d like to see this cruel conflict ended
I’d like to see my Daddy once again
I’d like to see the Yankees win this battle
I’d like to see France get back her promised land
I’d like to see this whole big world United
And I’d like to see the Kaiser with a lily in his hand.

A stand of Orienpets

Lilies Can Be Intoxicating

I could blog living-color lily pictures for the next hour but I won’t. Instead I’ll doggedly revert to the subject of work. Never have I worked as much, as hard or as long as I have since retirement. The relaxed, goal-free, carefully rationed attention span of my pre-retirement career seems like a distant dream to me now.

In retirement I have understood some things about work that I never understood before:
I am at an age where I have nothing to prove.
No world record or even personal best needs establishing.
I could spend all day reading in my hammock under a tree, and that would be fine.
I can’t free mothers from sorrow, end cruel conflict, unite this whole big world, or fix anything, even for the people closest to me.
And it isn’t the Kaiser’s fault either. That is just how it is.

Tiger Lilies, a Wild Species, Have a Modest Charm but Somehow Still Feel Splendid

Some old work habits die hard. My main pre-retirement work, professional and amateur, has always been writing. Friends and relatives seem reluctant to ask why every serious project takes me ten or twenty years. Maybe they’re afraid I’ll quote Ruskin, and nobody wants that. I don’t want that either. I wouldn’t quote Ruskin. I long ago knew the real answer — it was the myth of perfectibility. Perfectibility easily becomes an idée fixe, an unshakable delusion, a literal misunderstanding of the nature of effort. We might even ask why such myths manage to survive.

The effort of servicing the delusion of perfectibility, however, has a valuable unintended effect. Perfectionism, always misplaced, still causes time to pass and time is an actual experience — and time is not an experience that can be rushed.

For instance, consider Rockfish, my longest book to date. Rockfish was repeatedly finished, and finally refinished in a second edition 250 pages shorter than the first edition, with all-new parts, as recently as last year. The two editions are different; the first edition was 800 pages long, languid, with concision sacrificed to flow. While I've long felt that concision is one of the most valuable attributes a piece of writing can have, an expansive sense of flow seemed appropriate for a book spanning approximately 250 years. I believe length was a fine choice. But the haunting sense that Rockfish was too long never left me and eventually I couldn’t resist the temptation to cut 250 pages out of it.

The second edition of Rockfish is accordingly action-packed, with incident piling on incident. Long transitions are gone. Dramas accrue fast enough to stack up. It’s a better book now for most adult readers. But nothing is perfect. In a book eleven generations long, nearly everyone dies. Begats and deaths come faster than in the first edition. The attention paid to religion also stands out more in the second edition, but religion was always somehow deeply important to the people of Rockfish, and they struggled creatively with it.

Maybe that’s appropriate, because Rockfish is in part a war novel -- although Rockfish is also, maybe above all, a story about generations of farmers. My personal experiences as a gardener began in elementary school but I have never been a farmer. Farming and gardening are different things. Rockfish draws this distinction throughout, but my personal experience of the stony red dirt farming Rockfish knew so well has been limited.

Reclaiming a field

This summer red dirt farming feels less remote than it had been. A few weeks ago my cousin Don and I started field-gardening a piece of his Dad's bottom land in the vicinity of Covesville, inside the Rockfish world. Already I find myself thinking, “What vivid descriptions I could add to Rockfish now!” The condition of this long-farmed but nearly abandoned field is wildly different from the gardening I know. The gardening I know is crafty, with hand-tailored soil drained by raised beds. The field in Covesville is red clay, which tends to form clods, and still spits up quartz rocks despite who knows how many years of plowing. This soil is not the fungal well-wormed earth of garden beds; it starts dry, with a guaranteed low germination rate. Only the hardiest squash, cucumber, okra, black-eyed peas, pumpkins, gourds and corn are going to sprout and survive. As of now we have no way to water this field. We are planting in 18th-19th century conditions -- except for the tractor. Either it will rain enough or everything will die, and that is the way things are.

Cousin Don in the background

Don and I look forward to the results with the gravest interest. I see it as an experiment, but this field has produced before. It is bottom land beside a creek, and in the bygone Rockfish centuries farmers called it good soil. Before that, Native Americans had the same opinion. The area is rich in stone artifacts that make it clear that Native Americans farmed in Covesville, possibly even on this same ground. Cropping this kind of dirt is how the ancestors survived. Still, to take a hoe to tilled earth and see it tumble rather than crumble seems odd and slightly frightening.

Of course, very likely farmers of the past worked in trepidation too — and they had a lot more at stake.
Presumably under steady cultivation, hopefully with some crop rotation, these old fields would have been considerably more friable, aerated, and manured. But after abandonment this red dirt soil quickly reverts to its original hard-packed character. This is the original dirt. We might be wary of it. It’s not as simple as organic garden dirt, collected and built up in raised or mounded beds. Digging, planting, in this dirt, one senses ancient mystery, human and non-human.

Surviving the way the Rockfish generations did is more vivid and incredible to me now than when I wrote Rockfish. In terms of crops and techniques, the old farmers were limited to plants that do well in red clay soil. The labor required to alter the dirt to better specifications was largely unavailable except to the Jeffersonian rich, who commandeered a reliable labor force to help. For red dirt family farms, there would have been very little spare time left in the year, and few spare resources.

I look back on Rockfish and wonder if I could have made that clearer. What happens when a person strikes red dirt with a hoe was one of the main things determining how the Rockfish people lived. There was nothing modern about it. The braided coexistence of mountain people with coastal colonists, with slavery, with civil war, with reconstruction and with segregation was weirdly predetermined in many ways by issues of labor and the nature of what could be produced from red clay dirt. That is easy enough be put in textbooks… but there’s still no easy way to explain what happens when a person with a hoe tackles a field of red clay.

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Three Consecutive Days in the Garden

6/7/2019

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May 28, 2019 -- Day 1
It’s been nine months since I've composed a blog. Right now, the topic on my mind is the amount of hard physical labor requisite for summer gardening in Virginia.

Elizabeth Lawrence once wrote, about gardening in North Carolina, that after spring anything requiring summer tending or watering had best be left to die. I don’t know what this says about weeds, which riot in the heat.

It’s still May, just barely, but we are getting into the 90s daily, which is breeding cycles of thunderstorms. One of last year’s iris beds, which drowned last year with the loss of most of the irises, sprang back with a dense crop of ragweed—a plant so soil-invasive I effectively lost the bed. I mean the soil in the bed. The soil can still be used as a dirt supplement for the lawn, but wherever I put this dirt, the ragweed will try to come back with it.

Actually lost the dirt.

Remains of the Bed's Stone Walls

I've now dismantled the stone walls, and I'm shaving the soil down to original ground level. This can only be done in the morning. I don’t necessarily feel that energetic in the AM, so I’m lucky if I get started by 9 AM. Somewhere around noon it becomes hard—and questionable—to keep going. Maybe the shovel will work itself, if I hang onto it. When an empty wheelbarrow feels as heavy as a full wheelbarrow, it’s time to quit.

At least one verdict is in. One can actually lose the garden soil itself, not just the plants. Weeds have been defined as “flowers nobody wants.” Weeds could also be defined as “most plants,” or every natural plant in the area. Gardening is about establishing a remarkably unnatural plant situation, often behind walls or fences, and then pitting it against the natural world in a life-and-death struggle. It comes as no surprise that even the Romans practiced gardening, as Vergil described in the Bucolics — selecting an imperial elite of plants, and marching them out to dominate the Italian world. But really everybody does it. It’s how we eat.

We have two gardeners here. Karen works in the vegetable garden. With two of us there is some economy of scale; we can garden more than twice the area either of us could conceivably manage alone. Karen’s vegetable garden is the back angle facing south. A portion of it is seen in the photo below, where the lens is starting to fog up in the noon humidity.

Part of Karen’s vegetable garden

The humidity on the camera lens renders this snapdragon somewhat mythological

A garden is meant to be in harmony with the universe. It is not usually meant to be a criticism of the universe, or an attempt by the gardener to show the world that he can do better than the universe. A garden is half appreciation, half offering, and half thanks — among many other things — as much as an act of naked aggression designed to enforce plantation colonialism.

Anyone trying the plant game will soon water the ground with her/his sweat as God ordained. Whatever one's garden dream is, it will not be achieved. Instead there are opportunities to notice what happens. There has to be time to sit and watch events unfold.

So in the way, jars

Roses

May 29, 2019 -- Day Two
It is now a day later than it was in the preceding paragraphs, and the dirt is gone from the salvaged garden space.

Raised bed removed

It is time to sit, as I mentioned above, and see what we see.

Warm seat, iced tea

There’s no telling what we might feel in the chair. We might experience “monkey mind,” an Anglicization of the Zen expression for ungoverned thoughts that leap from branch to branch chattering like monkeys. We might wish we actually had real monkeys in the trees, to entertain us. We might realize that real monkeys would tear everything up. We might realize how rich nature is in destructive things and Darwinian wastage. We might be just as happy reconsidering the fate-weaving, intermittently purposeful gods of western classical times and search for oracles. I certainly don’t know. I might not actually have any recommendations at all.

But I will say this is not necessarily the most comfortable chair.

Deep mahogany-red Asiatic lilies

May 30, 2019 -- Day Three
While I fantasize about nature, I know that every being in nature is implacably hunting for protein, minerals and water so it can express itself, generally at a cost to other beings. The plant/animal divide is stark, but there is a bridge between the two in fungi and mildew. One of the masks nature wears is the appearance of countless forms of life; another, that the forms are quantifiable by scientific observation and not countless at all; and yet another mask, the illusion that it just happened by itself.

The ragweed ravaged raised bed has been replaced. A miniature blue star spruce, a creeping cryptomeria, and a dwarf black dragon cryptomeria have been riskily rescued and transplanted from the raspberry grove that overtook them two years ago. Here is how it looks today.

Redone bed in the midday sun

Black raspberries rapidly ripening

I hope the miniature evergreens understand that their transplantation was kindly meant, and view it as an opportunity and live and flourish. Since they are plants attached to soil and water and air, it would be silly to credit them with beliefs like destiny, or emotions like irritation at being transplanted. But plants have an understanding, each to its kind; we might even say they constitute an understanding expressed in their forms. We humans actually have no idea what their understandings are like.

I’ve recalled a better definition of what constitutes a weed. I don’t recall whose definition this is, but it’s a very good one. Weeds are plants that thrive invasively (in effect, reproduce well) in disturbed ground. “Disturbed ground” could be used as a more pessimistic definition of what a garden is. Gardening disturbs the ground profoundly and keeps it disturbed, giving wild plants that like that sort of thing a real chance to flourish explosively.

Returning to yesterday’s chair talk, one of the things I sometimes experience as soon as I sit down is desperation. For example, I feel some real satisfaction at replacing the old iris bed. But my satisfaction is haunted by the other tasks that need doing in this garden. For instance, a large bed expansion I started last year was sidelined last fall and remains to be completed. Some very nice plants were planted in it, including purple-black hollyhocks from a nearby local farm, and an amazing dragon arum (dracunculus) that I ordered from a plant catalog. But this year, at least so far, this incomplete project has turned half jungle and can only be saved by removing the invading weeds. The time to do it is now. Summer gardening can be absurd.

Is it possible we have monkey mind when sitting in the garden because we actually are… nah, couldn’t be. Laugh if we must!

May 30. Black hollyhocks

A dragon aurum in the weeds

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Why There Is a Macaque, or How "The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I." Came to Be

9/5/2018

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When I was around eleven or twelve, I used some of my lawn mowing money to join the Science Fiction Book Club. I still have the bonus volume that came with my first order. I subscribed for years. There’s no telling what impact Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination had on my social imagination. When The Drowned World and The Wind from Nowhere were published as twin novelettes by the Science Fiction Book Club in 1965, I fell under the spell of J.G. Ballard and never escaped.

The most generous offer ever made (Wikipedia).

Captain Edward Ruppelt’s long-lived UFO classic was up front in 1956, bookended with Asimov’s 1955 The End of Eternity. (Wikipedia)

Sci Fi covers were terrific (photo Gary Mawyer)

Science fiction is a way of exploring the future without going there, but science fiction is not all about futuristic machinery; it is a genre of social writing and often takes the nature and future prospects of Civilization as its topic. A capitalized Civilization, because in Sci Fi, civilization is frequently the main subject. Building, maintaining, losing, and if necessary rebuilding civilization is the huge theme taken in hand by countless science fiction works, short and long. Another great theme is an outrageous protagonist surviving in a dysfunctional civilization.

Or not surviving… (Wikipedia)

It’s a daunting tradition and I never imagined I would trespass in the haunted grove myself. But about fifteen years ago my son Edward thrust into my hands an untitled manuscript 30 pages long, framing the mad adventures of Reese Macaque. More than a few people saw Ted’s work and thought it was either deadly funny or too disturbing to be funny. It was a manuscript ambitious past the dreams of English majors, told from inside a startlingly real world, a world disturbingly like ours, and yet backlit with unjustified flashes of hope and aspiration.

For a time Ted and I worked on a short story version of the original manuscript, and Ted produced several more short passages that would most naturally go to other stories. The main artistic question about Rhesus A. Macaque was not simple. How is it that Macaque is a human? Or is he a monkey? As you can see, the main artistic question promptly split in half on us, but both halves pointed in the same direction: is there just one Macaque or are they a kind of thing?

That was how I found myself writing a science fiction detective novel, The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I. Detective novels are generally novels of manners. A science fiction detective novel of manners is (I suppose) about social interactions in a future world—and an obvious way to dissect social behaviors in our world. In the case of this book, the society in question is ours, in the year 2296. In this world Yeats was obviously quite correct: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.”

That being said, iit was years before I realized that Macaque was science fiction. For a good while I assumed it was a fantasy, specifically a nonsense fantasy in the same genre as Edward Lear’s The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World or John Collier’s His Monkey Wife, first published in 1930 and still very much in print. Of course nonsense is a very serious business.

Edward Lear’s The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World.
(Photo by Gary Mawyer)

But over the last few years, I began to believe that the little tales of mystery and detection that Ted and I have laid out in The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I. are set in a more-than-probable future world—a world we will in fact be hard pressed to avoid. Though the world of P.I. Macaque didn’t seem likely to be an accurate or literal description of the future at first, I have come to think the present social moment is already close to it. Macaque seems to be on the road to actuality after all. So thanks, Ted. In an act of imagination, or maybe prescience, you created the world of Reese Macaque. We’re its first citizens but I have a notion that in the years to come just about everybody is probably going to have to live in it, whether they read this book or not.

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Second edition of Rockfish just published

8/3/2018

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I started Rockfish in 1995, substantially finished it in 2002 and published it in 2009. An entire American generation has grown up since I started this book and another generation will shortly follow. Nonetheless, the racial issues portrayed in Rockfish are still thriving in Central Virginia. As recently as the summer of 2017, Ku Klux Klan members and American Nazis violently invaded Charlottesville, causing many injuries and loss of life. Clearly, Americans and certainly Virginians still remain genealogically fraught with themselves, literally on a local level.

Reflecting on local and national events over the past year, this summer I decided to revise and re-issue Rockfish. To a considerable degree, Rockfish is a book exploring how racial identities were formed and originally came into tension in Central Virginia, starting with the British settlement period. The basis of the book is merely history. I wanted to go back and make sure nothing obstructed its original purpose, which is as important now as it ever has been.

Race has meant different things at different times over the last several centuries. Race has never been a fixed concept. Definitions of race have varied from generation to generation for many reasons and we can assume that race, as a concept, will continue to evolve and vary in years to come. Ironically, the characters in Rockfish do not always care very much about race themselves; they are naturally more concerned with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—as most people are. But no Virginia community could escape the scars of slavery, civil war, Jim Crow, eugenics and segregation. Race was forced to matter; and people adapted.

For more on this new release, see my Rockfish page, which includes some added photos of Rockfish, then and now.

The new edition of Rockfish is available on amazon in kindle and print.

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Volterra and Siena

12/9/2017

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This is the final post in a series of blog posts describing a trip with my son Alex in Germany and Italy this past July. At the end of my last post, we were leaving Elba for Volterra, in Tuscany.

Tuscany was hot, hotter than Virginia, hot like Hawaii—and seemed dryer than either. Coming past Riparbella we saw a marker for the Fonte di Lepre and almost simultaneously, a good-sized hare, a big stringy one. This sort of thing happens when you travel.

Smouldering Tuscan Landscape Outside Volterra

It was just the same several years ago in Japan, hiking downhill toward the Kumano Hongū Taisha, where Yatagarasu led the boar hunter when the Kumano Deities appeared. To all purposes the same ravens were there today. And here at the Fonte di Lepre was a lepre.

When the boars, eagles, stags, griffins, dragons, buzzards and other animals that form the heraldry of North Italy get tired of blundering into each other and require intelligent advice and a moment of sense, they come round and ask the lepre. We don’t have to wonder about that.

Volterra is not very large. As soon as we arrived we ran around the wall three times like so many Hectors, not so much pursued by Achilles or acting out the Iliad as pursuing our hotel, cleverly secreted away in the narrow winding lanes.

The walls of Volterra

The town remains fortified. It is very much a fortress town.

Long climb up to the middle gate… Alex barely visible… and there is another flight of stairs below this one.

The ancientness of Volterra is right on the surface. The Etruscan acropolis at the summit of the town is a public park as well as an archeological site today—the orange fencing in the photo below marks the dig.

View of the Etruscan acropolis of Volterra from a nearby cathedral tower: the Renaissance Medici fortress is just visible on the left.

The Etruscan gate of Volterra—said to be the only Etruscan arch still standing.

Most of the facing stones of the Etruscan gate are more recent, some of them much more recent, but the core stones of the gate are almost megalithic.

Huge Etruscan wall blocks in this gate.

The upper hallway outside the door of our hotel room had once been part of the Etruscan city wall, so we had a good chance to look at the older stonework quite closely. The oldest stonework generally seemed to be the largest. This may only be a sampling error. The largest stonework should rationally last the longest. But the “oldest is biggest” bias is so persistent that one wonders if there could be potent but unclear cultural reasons why early civilizations found megalithic or near-megalithic stonework reasonable, if not actually convenient, while later civilizations scaled down the blocks in their structures even when the structures were enormous. No answer here.

Newer walls.

We hadn’t really considered what Roman ruins we might find in Volterra, but the Romanized city of the Volterrans was an important place. The old Roman theater and athletic training grounds are outside the walls.

Roman amphitheater and athletic facilities, still in community theater use.

The Etruscan necropolis of ancient Volterra, outside the walls, went largely unmolested for all the long years of Rome and the baronial ages that followed. Just as the Romans built over or through the Etruscan city, the Italians built over and through the Roman city. The Medici fortress dominating the acropolis marked the end of both independence and growth, and Volterra rusticated in situ. The Etruscan necropolis remained irrelevant to all this and not locally interesting until the eve of the modern age, when extraordinarily well timed efforts were made to salvage and preserve the items in the surviving tombs, including the alabaster sarcophagi or box urns in the tumuli.

Etruscan tomb (Wikimedia Commons).

I’m not a big fan of museums but the Etruscan museum in Volterra is worth going to Italy to see. I should warn fellow prospective tourists that the Etruscans are in fact dead. They are bone dead, stone dead, dead as stock and stone. But Volterra is also built out of them, and we noticed in living faces the mirrors of the faces on the sarcophagi—sarcophagi often themselves decorated with mirrors. The Etruscans at Volterra left much, it seems. But there are not many Volterrans—there never had been very many. Modernity has found this town, the moderns being the vastest besieging army ever to tackle the place, overwhelming it in one generation.

We scarcely tried to photograph the sarcophagi. Somehow I felt as if they perhaps warned off photography. Reducing the alabaster or terra cotta cabinets to a 2-D image would fail even more than usual; the carving and molding is deep and tactile. There seemed to be two main stylistic urges, a volumetric style of representing the human form and its draperies that seems at first glance a little crude or disproportioned, and a Graeco-Etruscan style, sometimes carried off with extreme finesse. The boxes may have feet, and the side panels are carved, sometimes in deep relief. The lid forms the bed or couch for a figure of the person whose ashes and bones are inside. Women’s sarcophagi are often decorated with mirrors, men’s sarcophagi with drinking cups. The puffier style of human representation, seen up close, makes considerable tactile sense. The somewhat conflated forms of the ancient Etruscans on their sarcophagi are meant for handling. The faces, all too fleshy, become subtly more real the longer one gazes into them. This bulkier modeling was a fashionable style for many centuries.

In the more Grecian style, the human figures are executed in classical proportions, often with extreme fineness of detail. Both styles frequently reference the Iliad. Having the abduction of Helen carved on women’s sarcophagi was fashionable almost to ordinariness. How the scene was represented varied enormously though, from stately embarkations with no hint of violence to more overt abduction scenes or even scenes with a touch of frenzy. Hand to hand combat between the heroes of the Iliad was equally common as a decoration for men. As Alex said, it would be hard to find a better indication of a pre-Homeric pan-Mediterranean civilization that knew and valued its Iliad reaching all the way to the Outer Sea.

Etruscan sarcophagus in painted terra cotta (Wikimedia Commons).

The archaic Volterrans were doing more than just including literary references on their tombstones. They were claiming kin with the Trojans in their grave imagery. It wasn’t fashion alone that caused this; they had themselves entombed with Trojan motifs because it was the most true thing they wanted said about themselves.

Vergil made the Roman claim to be descended from Trojan refugees famous forever, but long before Rome’s Golden Age the Volterrans also took this idea with literally mortal seriousness. Perhaps it’s likely enough. We know roughly when and where Homer sang the Iliad in its climactic form. But we don’t know when or where the Iliad was first sung. The famous “catalogue of ships” looks suspiciously like the original beginning, buried behind a long and complex explanatory narrative that includes multiple side stories. Homer’s version is explicitly told more from the Greek side but there are Trojan passages. Vergil’s Aeneid is a reprised Iliad told from the Trojan perspective, but there could have been even earlier shadow-Iliads. Can we be sure what version of the Iliad the archaic Volterrans valued so much? Do we even know why the Romans, at the dawn of the Republic, did such a thorough job of forgetting the alphabets of the Etruscan Umbrians and Tuscans? Was this indifference or were there conflicting genealogical narratives that needed to be lost?

We can be fairly sure, though, that Greek refugees bringing an artistic style with them reached Volterra, and their Iliad was surely Homer’s. Somehow they obviously fitted right in.

Though the Etruscan treasures are the glory of Volterra’s museum, their collection of Renaissance painting includes some rare examples. They haven’t wandered far from where they were painted, and retain some of the hauntedness I cannot explain.

Beautiful angels.

Saint Having Beatitudes.

In Arcadia Ego.

Fresco in Volterra.

We left Volterra the next day, after a long morning walk. We were off to San Gmignano, noted for its wine, cheese, and surviving defensive towers.

The Tuscan countryside.

Some of the many towers of San Gmignano.

We were still indefatigably in the land of the tartufo, or truffle. San Gmignano was immensely charming and literally blitzed with fellow tourists.

The local ‘Boar and Truffle’ in San Gmignano.

In due course we reached Siena.

Siena’s city walls as seen from our hotel’s outdoor bar.

And the truth of Siena is that we were stopping there for the night and would do no justice to the place. We would see two of the stupendous things in Siena: the incredible cathedral, and the town square. But mainly we would just wander around reflecting that our Italian idyll was at an end.

Siena: the cathedral.

Portico.

Not the work of a moment.

Town Square: a night view.

Eureka!

It was our last night in Italy. We owed ourselves something to eat. We wandered until we saw a restaurant with a star.

Coucous tossed with lemon juice, parsley and cheese was the perfect opener. Then came the smoked duck breast carpaccio, and our mood changed. Our mood had to change. We were taking this meal much too lightly. We had a good enough table next to the local lawyers who appeared to still be arguing a case, had settled into a fine red, had done the coucous salad with a clear conscience, and had then been presented with an apparent miracle. We were going to have to eat this dish with bite-by-bite mindfulness. The smoked duck breast carpaccio was metaphysical.

I could speak of the rest of this meal, or not. Outside, the dark medieval streets were deserted. Only the hoot of a distant owl broke the crystalline silence as the sommelier, one of the last few people left in the building, unwrapped a cold bottle of grappa from its white linen coif and explained that this bottle was from Udine, was rare, was not the usual thing, was a kind of arcane mad nectar within the known spectrum of the grappa world. I guess we had probably asked, “What is it?” or “Is there anything else you can do to us?” I don’t remember.

The Udine grappa turned out to be everything claimed for it. They say you can’t explain the taste of chocolate or hashish, because chocolate and hashish have no kindred analogous flavors. I would add a third thing to the list: whatever was in that bottle.

But we did get back to our hotel. And then out of Italy altogether. Our mistake, I guess. I had not had the slightest desire whatsoever to leave Elba. But if we had stayed on Elba forever, there’d have been no smoked duck breast carpaccio for us. That’s how things are. You have to keep hopping along if you want to meet the next duck, but you’ll inevitably regret all the things you left behind. And that’s the end of this blog series on our 2017 visit to Italy.

Not in Italy anymore!

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Exiled from Elba

10/25/2017

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This is the seventh in a series of blog posts describing a trip with my son Alex in Germany and Italy this past July. At the end of my last post, we were about to leave Rome for Elba.

That morning, I woke up in Rome honestly wondering if I would be able to hobble out to the car. It was time to celebrate the wonders of Leukoplast (moleskin bandage.) We had bought a roll of Leukoplast back when we were in the Alps, and initially had thought that the fact that it came in a roll was inconvenient, as it had to be cut into band-aid shapes for normal use, which meant borrowing scissors at hotel desks. But now the point of the roll made itself plain—one could swathe the whole forefoot, or rather forefeet in the case of bipeds. So the people that make Leukoplast know what they are doing after all. Tourism is akin to airplane rides—if you can walk away, things probably went as well as they needed to.

Such is the crazy tourist impulse to “see enough” to justify the trip, when combined with the time constraints imposed by costs and careers. Not that I have a career; being retired, I no longer do. Alex has a career though. But it costs money to travel, so I do have costs. Nice as it would have been to stay a week or a month everywhere we went, we were on the hop: a see-and-flee itinerary.

Thus our lightning run on Elba. We went to Elba out of curiosity. Elba, we found, merited more than a day, a week or a month. A year would not have been too much. Napoleon spent less than a year on Elba before hopping a frigate for the Hundred Days. He must have been full-on deranged. Elba is enchanted.

Joseph Beaume, Napoleon leaving Elba (Wikipedia).

It’s a modest easy drive up the coast on the Autostrada from Rome to Piombino, where ferries depart for the Tuscan Archipelago, Corsica and Sardinia. There are four ferry companies and a schedule crowded with departures and arrivals, and English and French are spoken, so connection to the islands of the Tyrrhenian Sea is easy. These are not the cheapest of ferries, but there is no reason why they should be.

Ferry port at Piombino.

In due course, Elba appears on the horizon.

Elba has more than one port, but the principal port is Portoferraio.

Portoferraio is guarded by an ancient fortress.

The town climbs up from its seawalks.

Portoferraio is charming

Elba has a deep history and an even deeper prehistory. Geologically Elba could be described as a miniature mountain range lifted off the sea bed by two orogenies and an acute volcanic intrusion that seamed parts of the island with iron and copper ore. Elba’s landscape is dramatic. At the dawn of history the island was important for its ores, but people lived on Elba even before history began.

There are precipitous beaches on Elba, with villages located on high promontories, connected by winding roads—exceptionally narrow involuted roads hanging on hillsides above stunning precipices.

Elba’s villages are at altitude. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

Part of the explanation for promontory villages on Elba has to do with piracy and slave-raiding. The islands and the Italian coast were hounded by slave raiders from archaic times well into the modern era. The final extirpation of the Barbary Corsairs, for instance, was not accomplished until early in the 19th century. Harbors like Portoferraio on Elba required major fortification and the presence of a warship or two for safety. More far-flung coastal communities had to rely on watchtowers and flight. The hilltop town was a more absolute solution.

Terrace agriculture still persists on Elba, though not on the scale of olden times. We saw numerous abandoned or semi-abandoned terraces. As a practical matter, this kind of agriculture requires specialized knowledge which, once abandoned, would need to be relearned from scratch for terrace farming to resume. One reads that Elba has a long dry season with rains concentrated in the autumn, but also that Elba is very nearly semitropical except at the higher elevations. Island agriculture is within Alex's knowledge base, not mine. I was intrigued by Alex’s speculations that Elba has been and could again be agriculturally rich terroir.

Elba’s roads are nothing short of an adventure. Twenty km or so after we began to drive them, we arrived at Hotel Sant’Andrea. The hotel was brilliantly located. It was love at first site.

Hotel grounds. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

Balcony terraces with native cat. The cat had the run of all the rooms.

Our itinerary on Elba was not very demanding. We schemed to enjoy the hotel balcony, drink some of the very best wine I have ever had, and have a nice meal at the hotel (which turned out to be gastronomically ineffable—Chef Sauro is a culinary genius and the wait staff was more like a band of new friends than a wait staff).

Octopus gnocchi: I recommend it. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

Room with a view. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

While staring at the horizon, we saw a subtle but unmistakable reminder—well, example really—of the tectonic violence underlying Italy: a perfect crescent of tsunami racing across the calm sea from horizon to horizon, as geometrical as if scribed by a compass. It was just a ripple comparatively speaking, and the undersea earthquake that set it off was not strong enough to feel, but as I say, it was a reminder.

The hotel was a few hundred meters above sea level and we at first thought the walk down and back was perhaps not an advantage; but in truth this was a walk not to be missed, past fascinating little villas, volcanic stone walls, wonderful succulents and other interesting plants.

Example of a wonderful succulent.

Anchorage at Sant’Andrea. Umbrellas and lounge chairs are for rent on the sand beach.

The pebble and sand beach was very popular but I far preferred the stony cape around the corner, where one could lay down on wave-smoothed sandstone and enjoy the warm, sparkling crystal sea.

Cape at Sant’Andrea.

A natural bathing spot.

Wonderful rock formations.

Tempted to invent a myth!

Ruminating on the history of the place, we could almost have fantasized that our iphones would rattle with news from Brussels and Washington of our necessary exile, in the name of all humanity and the best interests of world peace. We too could have been Napoleons, but not make the mistake Buonaparte made in leaving Elba.

But in the upshot, no government or other public body came to our rescue. In almost no time, we were exiled from, rather than to, the island of Elba. It was time to head on to Volterra, a major city of the ancient Etruscans.

Elba receding.

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Sic Transit Roma

10/6/2017

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Alex’s common sense is one of the advantages of traveling with him. Our scheme, once we arrived in Rome, was to walk from our hotel to the Appian Gate, which was not far, and then follow the Via Appia on foot into the city, past the Baths of Caracalla to the Colosseum and Forum, and then continue on to the Tomb of Augustus and the banks of the Tiber as the endpoint of our walk. Then we would take a more looping route back to the Via Appia by way of the Pantheon and the Circus Maximus, and return to our hotel. It was no great distance, though in July with temperatures well over 90 F and no clouds, the walk was not as easy as it would have been in a cooler season.

The walls of Rome.

Porta Appia.

The history of the walls of Rome is a complex subject. The Appian Gate or Porta Appia contains a museum making the subject as clear as it can be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museo_delle_Mura

Totila, King of the Goths during the last phase of the Byzantine-Ostrogothic War, is credited with pulling down much of the Aurelian Walls in 546 C.E. But leveling the walls of Rome was a massive project that could not be carried to completion. Totila’s reasoning was that Rome without walls would lose its military significance. To further Totila’s plan of rendering Rome irrelevant, the Gothic troops rounded up the last few hundred inhabitants of Rome and resettled them north of Naples. Rome was briefly a ghost town like Carsulae, with no one in it. But in fact Rome remained a vital road junction as the war continued, and armies and people trickled back, the city began to regrow, wall repairs followed and Rome remained a largely walled city into the 17th Century.

Behind the Aurelian-era gate are the ruins of an older gate on the Via Appia.

The Aurelian Walls, built between 271 and 275 CE, enclosed over 400 square miles of classical Rome south of the Tiber River. There were passages on more than one level inside the wall as well as on top of the wall. Each tower was itself a large and substantial building. The top of the wall was broad enough to accommodate a roadway, or to divide into quarter-acre lots for that matter.

Top of the Aurelian Wall: It’s a Very Wide Wall.

We were visiting on a Sunday so there was almost no traffic on the Via Appia until we neared the Baths of Caracalla, where there was light traffic. Sadly, one can no longer find baths at these Baths. Surely there are only a few other brick ruins of this size in the world, if any. The photo below shows a mere corner of this gargantuan complex, which in its entirety is the size of a small town. Built early in the 3rd Century C.E. and completed during the reign of Emperor Caracalla, these were the second-largest public baths in Imperial Rome.

The Baths of Caracalla.

Not long after, we walked past the tour bus entrance to the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill. Truly this was a scene from Dante. Though not yet 10:00 a.m., the sidewalk was already a roasting grill. Several hundred people were being sorted out into their appropriate tour lines and given tickets so they could go through the metal detectors and other security one at a time. It wasn’t going to be quick. Honestly, it looked hellish. I didn’t have the heart to photograph it.

Around the corner we found the Colosseum, which has its own ticket complex, as well as another set of double lines for the Forum. The lines at the Colosseum were merely borderline terrible. Near Trajan’s Column we found some uncrowded ticket/security queues, but by then we’d decided that not being fenced in was worth more to us than tickets. We might not have been wild beasts to start with, but we would have turned into wild beasts by the time we got through the lines. It did not seem necessary to line up to stand at some particular spot.

Rome endures.

Hammered to within an inch of its life.

A wreck of time--The Forum of Nerva.

Shades of Gibbon: The Capitoline Hill. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

The Column of Trajan. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Wandering around the various Forums and the Capitoline and Palatine Hills, we went into a number of churches. They seemed oddly out of place. The ceremonial center of Rome spent many centuries after the collapse of Roman power as a quarry and landfill. Ringing a quarry with Baroque churches was not something inevitable. It did not have to happen, but it did. It is a feature of the baroque to shoot for the majestic and achieve only excess.

Deep thoughts, these.

The immense Victor Emmanuel Monument, or Altare della Patria, erected between 1911 and 1925, however, didn’t seem excessive at all. Here was unabashed decorative enthusiasm on the correct Augustan scale.

Altare della Patria, Rome.

Rome is a great walking town. You can hardly avoid iconic spots like the Spanish Steps and the Trevi Fountain.

Skyline of Rome from the Spanish Steps.

Trevi Fountain. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

As the day wore on, we encountered more and more people—as we had expected. But when we veered off toward the Mausoleum of Augustus, we found the vicinity of the mausoleum almost deserted. Sadly, the mausoleum itself was under construction. We stumbled into its museum instead. The Ara Pacis Museum houses the remains of the Augustan Altar of Peace from 9 BCE, built into a full-sized reconstruction. The Ara Pacis Augustae is located next to the Tiber River and we surmised that as the structure was pushed over, the fragments had been rapidly buried in silt.

Ara Pacis relief. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

The concept of power and the concept of the modern state are fused in the Western mind with the notion of Rome itself. The republican and imperial power systems of Rome, prior to the coming of the Goths, have governed, guided, and fascinated the West for over two millennia. In fact, we might even define the beginning of Western "modernity" as the period when Roman systems of power re-emerged in the West. These systems have in common the ideal of a citizen-state whose members enjoy certain prerogatives not shared with those outside the state. The inside/outside tension and the assumed right of the state to grow and overtop its neighbors, like a plant, and aggrandize other cultures is quintessentially "Roman" in this sense. When the world talks about "imperialism," it is the Roman kind of imperialism that is meant.

Ingres, Napoleon on His Imperial Throne (Wikipedia).

For all their outright militarism, the ancient Romans were more peaceful than the powers and principalities that followed them. The Empire mainly projected its warfare, which was continuous, beyond its borders. Arguably the republican S.P.Q.R. yielded to the Empire only because the Republic could no longer guarantee safety from civil war to citizens living within boundaries of the Roman state. Nonetheless, the idea of the citizen-state never died in Italy. Venice was a republic from birth—Venice rose from the sea as a republic. Other Italian city-states had republican moments throughout their histories. The relationship of Rome and other city states in Tuscany and Umbria and elsewhere was not that of lord over subject.

Musing thus, we headed to the Pantheon. Stripped of its pagan gods, studded with post-ancient finery, and turned into a Catholic church it seemed to have a somewhat mutilated air, its gods stripped out, its niches empty or substituted with Baroque images of saints who had nothing to do with the purpose of the building.

The Pantheon in Rome. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

I would like to say a lot more about the Pantheon but any attempt I might make to catalog the details we saw would contribute nothing. I will confide that the Pantheon is a great deal bigger than it looks, even up close, and especially when you are in it. And a second realization, which was that the builders of the Pantheon probably did not think of themselves as classical and are unlikely to have known that concept. The avid adoption of Greek elements was all very well but the Greeks could not have built a structure like the Pantheon. They did not have concrete, for one thing. Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa put the original building up during the reign of Augustus (27 BCE--14 CE). When they asked him how he would like his building signed, he obviously replied “Right in the middle, and carve it deep.” The original Pantheon caught fire and the reconstruction, during Hadrian's reign circa 126 CE, was something brash and demonstrably novel.

The Romans believed that man needed all the gods -- all the help he could get. It’s as true today as ever. Humans struggle inwardly as much as they struggle with the outside. There's a taut pressured border between inside and out. The Romans' answer was the pier, the vault, the dome, to create a massive load-bearing edge between the two, the heaviest way they could testify to the sheer weight of world.

Tiers, Idle Tiers. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

We were fairly exhausted when we reached the Circus Maximus, largely quarried away. I entered the course on the back turn and plodded the length of the stadium. Of course I imagined chariot races. Presumably all visitors to this place do. Roman chariot races mainly used horses, I believe, but the Romans of old would have been just as thrilled with zebras or ostriches. They loved the exotic. A dozen-goat chariot would have appealed wildly to Bacchanalians. I imagined how many cats it would take to pull a chariot around the Circus Maximus—some hundreds, in a gigantic fan-shaped harness, perhaps propelled short distances by catnip or some other lure after a couple of years of chariot conditioning. It would be a long way down the back stretch of the Circus Maximus by cat-chariot. This of course was a fantasy, but one could imagine a team of big Tiberian Stripers that could clear the length of the Circus Maximus and get into the shade of the back streets without a heat stroke. Rome is, after all, a city of cats.

http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/torre-argentina-roman-cat-sanctuary

After the imaginary race, we sat down across from a parked motor home decked out like a gypsy caravan. I had a plastic bottle of hot water, and I poured it over my head for the evaporation. Despoiled luggage was strewn through the bushes under the trees, alongside occasional bits of broken column. There were some pretty nice campsites for vagrants. We had wandered a street or two over from the Via Appia, in a neighborhood of gated and barred mansions and gardens where the owners probably came and went by limousine to avoid the broken needles.

The presumed vagrants seemed harmless enough and perhaps we were vagrants too in some larger sense. We propelled ourselves along the cobbles by main force, feet and legs numb. As in the morning, there was almost no traffic on the Appian Way. We were refreshed enough by the shade to detour across the park surrounding the Tomb of the Scipios, reaching the Via Latina to come out by a different gate, where we rewarded ourselves with gelato.

(Photo by Alex Mawyer)

After returning to the hotel, showering, and rewrapping our much-abused feet, we collected our laundry, put it in the trunk of our rental, and drove off to the Tomb of Caecelia Metella. This 1st century BCE tomb has been one of the principal landmarks on the Via Appia or Appian Way for more than 2000 years. Apparently, nothing but the family name is known about its occupant.

Via Appia mit dem Grabmal der Caecilia Metella – Oswald Achenbach, 1886.

As things are today.

The Tomb of Caecilia Metella was originally a wedding cake of marble decorations, and the museum inside has collected many fragments. This structure evolved from tomb to post-classical fortification, medieval castle, and lava quarry. For centuries it was a mine-head for the choice volcanic stone that forms the hill.

Details of tomb.

A landscape of tombs. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Judging from the artwork, the Appian Way seems to have been much more crowded with highly decorated tombs in Piranesi’s time. Piranesi’s 18th century visions have touches of fantasy, but there must have been fragments everywhere. A lot of marble was stripped but quite a bit simply dropped off the brickwork.

Appian Way, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, La antichità romane, 1756 (Wikipedia).

The hauntingly beautiful Appian Way is a popular twilight walk for local residents.

Café walled with Roman fragments.

From the sublime to the ridiculous. Rome is not an easy place to find a laundromat on Sunday evening. Even the 24-hour laundries are mostly closed on Sunday, as it turns out. We identified a chain that was open and drove across the Tiber and into modern Rome. The laundry was open, yes, but the central control panel that took money and distributed soap was out of order. We hauled the laundry back to the car and drove away, detouring along a massive city boulevard, feeling exhausted. “I’d really like to see another open laundromat and a Burger King,” Alex said. Two blocks farther, the sign for a 24-7 laundromat gleamed pallidly in the night, with a Burger King across the street. There was a single open parking space, and it was in front of the laundromat. So the gods do live yet.

It was 10 P.M. We took turns minding the laundry. Alex minded the laundry first while I went out to get dinner. The young folks packing the Burger King plainly wondered why an American was wandering around on this side of the Tiber. I can only imagine what they thought when a second American turned up 15 minutes later.

This was my favorite part of the Rome trip, because it had real Romans in it. But we took no photos — I guess it was too real for the camera. Clinically, the last time my feet were as beat up as that was after a 30-mile stretch in West Virginia with a full backpack. These were nominally the same feet I started with, but they did not look it.

We had not seen the grave of Keats, in the old Protestant Cemetery next to the Pyramid of Cestius. We had erred sadly in not climbing the magnificent Altare della Patria. Another day, and we would have made it. But we were about to leave Rome for Elba, as the next post will discuss.

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Gary Dale Mawyer has been writing for over four decades, and to date has published four novels, Rockfish, The Southern Skylark, Exemptions, and The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I., as well as a biographical history, Sergeant Wolinski and the Great War, and a short story collection, Dark and Other Stories. Gary's writings draw on a wealth of history, lore and lived experience. He has a B.A. and an M.F.A. from the University of Virginia. Gary is a Central Virginia native with over 40 years of publishing and editing experience. His interests include American and Virginia history, military history, geology, hiking, travel, landscaping and gardening. He is the father of four grown children and has four grandchildren. He lives with his wife Karen and two cats in Albemarle County.

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