Autumn's Tree

O autumn winds that bake and burn
And all the world to darkness turn,
Now storm and seize and make of me...
A swarm of leaves from Autumn's Tree!

Ray Bradbury, The Halloween Tree (London: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), p. 67.

Ghosts of Mani

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2006; 1958), p.79:

In summer, ghosts are said to roam the Mani in the hottest hour of the day, in winter at the darkest hour of the night. If their mortal predecessors have been killed by an enemy, they wail for revenge. Summer ghosts haunt graveyards, ruined churches and cross roads. A man’s blood is supposed to shout out loud the day before he dies and if he perishes by violence his blood remains wet on the spot until a wooden cross is driven into the ground there; then it dries up or drains away. (The Maniots have a death fixation which is almost Mexican; perhaps the blazing light, the naked rock and the cactuses engender the same processes in either place.) The dead are turned into werewolves until forty days after their death and, stealing indoors at night, they eat the dough out of the kneading-troughs—any trough that is empty when it should be full is a werewolf’s work. Witches are said to lead people in a trance up the mountain-side at dead of night to torture them there. Regular sleepwalkers, of which there seem to be a number, are known as the string-loparméni, the witch-taken ones. Then there is a terrible devil called Makrynas,[1] “the faraway one,” who invariably appears in deserted places in the haunted hour of noon. I have not been able to learn what he looks like or what harm he does, but he is usually encountered by women who run away shrieking in panic through the rocks and olives. Could he be Pan himself, up to his old game with the latterday descendants of Syrinx and Echo? The nereids, the oreads, the dryads, the hamadryads and the gorgons all survive transposed in the minds of country Greeks. The Faraway One may be the chief woodland god himself.

Citrus

Citrus (柑橘属).

An orange or tangerine, I can never tell. Both are grown in ample abundance here in Hunan, but this one was growing wild on 'Phoenix' Mountain (凤凰山).

The Extreme Oddness of Existence

The extreme oddness of existence is what reconciles me to it.

Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia (London: Constable & Company, 1933), p. 153.

Sleep Song

'Deirín dé'

       Deirín dé, deirín dé!
Tá an bunnán donn ag laḃairt san ḃféiṫ;
        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
Tá an túirnín lín amuiġ san ḃfraoċ.

        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
Ġeoḃaiḋ ba siar le héirġe an lae;
        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
Is raġaiḋ mo leanḃ dá ḃfeiġilt ar féar.

        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
Éireoċaiḋ gealaċ is raġaiḋ grian fé;
        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
Tiocfaiḋ ba aniar le deireaḋ an lae.

        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
Leigfead mo leanḃ ag piocaḋ sméar,
        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
Aċt codlaḋ go sáṁ go fáinne an lae!

 
'A Sleep Song'

        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
The brown bittern speaks in the bog;
        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
The nightjar is abroad on the heath.

        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
Kine will go west at dawn of day;
        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
And my child will go to the pasture to mind them.

        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
Moon will rise and sun will set;
        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
Kine will come east at end of day.
        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
I will let my child go gathering blackberries,
        Deirín dé, deirín dé!

Pádraic H. Pearse, Collected works of Pádraic H. Pearse, 5 vols (Dublin: The Phoenix Publishing Co., 1924), II, pp. 108-11.

Pearse's notes on the poem:

The Sleep Song which I add as a pendant to the song of childhood and death [this refers to the previous poem in the anthology: Pádraig Ó hÉigeartaigh's ‘Ochón! A Dhonncha’] I have pieced together from my recollection of a song; that I heard in my own childhood from the woman to whom I owe all my enthusiasms. Where my memory has failed I; have filled in the; lacunae from a version of the; same lullaby taken down in West Cork by Mr. Amhlaoibh Lynch. The refrain “deirín dé” is the name given by children to the last spark at the end of a burning stick used in certain games. With the thought in stanzas 2 and 3 compare Sappho’s “Hesperus, thou bringest back all that daylight scattereth, thou bringest the lamb and the; goat to fold, thou bringest the infant to its mother.”

Eurasian Wild Pig Jawbone

Eurasian Wild Pig (Sus scrofa, 野猪).

There are wild pigs in Hunan but they do not often enter into the cities. One must have gotten close as this jawbone was deposited by a stream in Taohualing Park.

Butterflies in the Autumn Sun

Blue Admiral (Kaniska canace) and Asian Comma (Polygonia c-aureum) by Taozi Lake, enjoying the warm sun, while it lasts.

Helios Elijah

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Roumeli (New York: New York Review of Books, 2006; 1966), p. 44:

His mountain-top shrines make the prophet Elijah especially revered. (Elias in Greek; the nomads call him “St. Lios.” When the Greek world went Christian he took over the hilltop fanes to Helios-Apollo, on the strength of his name and partly because both their careers ended in the sky in fiery chariots.)[18] “He’s a mountain man like us,” they say, “he lives in the wilderness and wanders from peak to peak. He helps us and we hallow him.” The Blessed Virgin is addressed under one of her many epithets; they call her Parigorítissa, the Consolatrix; as an alien and a woman who has somehow insinuated herself into their midst, her honours are fairly cursory. St. Paraskeví is another female saint with some status. Each stani—each “fold,” clan or gathering of families and huts—has its own feast day, fortuitously depending on chapels that lie in their favourite pastures. Some have won general acceptance: the Assumption—like Elijah’s, the eponymous churches often perch on mountains; St. Constantine, the champion of Hellenism; the Deposition and the Purification; and in the Agrapha mountains, the Nativity of the Virgin, thanks to her great monastery there, hard of access in the Proussos gorge. Our Lady of Vella, between Yanina and Konitza, is honoured for a like reason. St. Athanasios is not cultivated as a Doctor of the Church, but, unexpectedly, as a warden of flocks. They neglect his January name-day because it falls in lambing-time and celebrate it later in the year. The fondness of Macedonian Sarakatsáns for St. John the Baptist is probably due to his shaggy iconographic outfit: it looks far more like their own goat-skin homespun than camel-hair; he lived in the wilderness too. They boil beans on his feast day and distribute and eat them in church. The bean-feast is linked with pagan magic ceremonial at harvest time and commemorates, almost certainly, the Pyanepsia when the ancients boiled and ate broad beans to bring fertility and a year of plenty.

Chinese Sweetgum Leaves

Chinese Sweetgum (Liquidambar formosana, 枫香).

For the most part, Autumn has not yet stripped the forest of its foliage, but the sweetgum trees have been one of the first to surrender their leaves. The leaves are colourful, useful (for feeding silkworms) and fragrant with a ripened sweat-and-sour odour.

Pirate Priests

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2006; 1958), p. 127:

No pirate enterprise of any consequence was complete without a priest. He blessed the expedition at its outset, prayed for fair weather for his parent ship and foul weather for the enemy and interceded for the souls of his fallen messmates. He absolved the sins of his floating flock and saw to it that a share of the loot, often wet with blood, was hung beside the ikons on the mainmast as a votive offering. If more than eight days passed and no prize came their way, he would intone a litany on the deck, and when a prospective prize was sighted he would level a matchlock over the bulwarks with the rest and join the boarding party with khanjar and scimitar.

Oriental Blechnum

Oriental Blechnum (Blechnum orientale, 乌毛蕨).

Another Yuelu mountain fern, which is widely distributed over subtropical and tropical Asia, showing a little Autumn colour.

Literature is Play

The rules of genre and of prosody, often so arbitrary, so fantastically elaborate, the terrain of profound yet somehow enfranchised seriousness on which the poet manoeuvres, suggest that he is playing a game–albeit the noblest, most consequential game man has so far devised. To the extent that it is language in a condition of autonomy, that it operates within conventional, non-utilitarian rules, all literature is play.

George Steiner, ‘Introduction’, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, by Johan Huizinga (London: Paladin, 1970), pp. 9-16 (p. 12).

Woodwardia Japonica

Woodwardia japonica (狗脊).

This medium-sized leptosporangiate fern is one of the most common ferns on Yuelu Mountain. I keep intending to pay more attention to local ferns. Perhaps this season I will make an effort to keep better track of the ones I see and identify unfamiliar species. Perhaps there will be other distractions.

What’s In a Name?

Alexander Vanautgaerden, Autoportraits d’Érasme. Zelfportretten van Erasmus. Selfportraits of Erasmus (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), p. 93:

Born in Rotterdam, Geert Geritzoon (Geert, son of Gerit), he would have to undergo a profound metamorphosis, if he was to impress the international scene. Rotterdam, at the end of the XVth century did not have the same renown as nowadays. For an Italian, a Rotterdammer was, at best, a provincial hick and, at worse, a barbarian. Geert Latinizes his name by using the antiquarian form of the trinomen. Geert means “to desire” in Dutch, thus “Desiderius”. The humanist then Hellenized his name; transforming “erasmios” (the beloved) to “Erasmus”, instead of “Erasmius” which would have been the correct way of spelling it: a beginner’s error that the humanist would regret throughout his life.