THE EARTHRISE DIARY (May, 2012)
Don Diespecker
© text Don
Diespecker 2012; individual © is retained by authors whose writings are
included in this text.
Movement, simple movement, is
perhaps the greatest mystery of the universe.
RH
Blyth: Haiku
A Note On The Brown Butterfly, Dear Readers: I took umpteen photos of
the wee beasties; I crept, stalked, pounced and bounced about the sunlit garden
and although I captured some weird images of my shadow and quite a few of the
butterfly (different individual butterflies on different days unless there was
just the one that was hogging the limelight) their images are almost impossible
to see. The last of these failed attempts is the one that may appear at the start
of this May Diary. I’m looking at it now. The butterfly is right in the middle
of the frame and it’s parked on one of those dreaded tropical grasses with the
indestructible root systems (I call it ‘blade grass’). The butterfly is facing
to the left, downward. The shadow of the butterfly on the hairy grass leaf
indicates the animal’s resting posture: each wing more or less up. I think the
port wing is in the way but at least you should be able to see most of the
starboard wing markings: a dot and a half and a longer blob. The real colour of
these wing ‘roundels’ is close to pale yellow (sometimes straw-coloured)
yellow. The real colour of the butterfly’s body is brown. I’m a terrible
failure as a butterfly image-maker. Sorry!
(Earlier in May) I was walking down Darkwood Road early one Sunday
morning and having passed and counted the eight horses in the Happenstance long
paddock I saw in the distance a number of parked vehicles near the Tyson’s
Track (I think it’s called) that connects Dorrigo with the Valley (the Track is
navigable by foot or by trail bike). Aha! I thought: are these guys horse
rustlers? If so where’s their big truck?
I’ll brazen it out, I decided, and walk boldly on. I was close to one
of those monstrous 4-WD urban attack vehicles when I suddenly became aware of a
young woman striding vigorously toward me. I veered out of her way. She quickly
climbed into the 4-WD, grinned down at me and said, ‘They’re all on a ten-stage
walk to a point on the coast.’ I grinned back and said what a fine day they had
for it and pressed on; it was then that I saw there were several more big
vehicles (none that would accommodate horses, though) and a large group of
walkers or hikers complete with back packs—and that they were all more or less
of my vintage. When I reached Richardson’s Bridge I paused to stare
reflectively and see the flow and was soon joined by the lead walkers or
pathfinders. The walkers were in no hurry; naturally they stopped and we
chatted. They assured me that they were not about to complete all of the remaining
stages in the one day. One member of the group referred to the neighbourhood as
paradise. ‘Please don’t tell anyone,’
I begged. It was good to chat with these fit-looking walkers. We exchanged a
hug or two and parted on good terms. There would be no horse duffing today.
(Later, when I’d decoded some information on websites I decided that my walker
friends were on Stage 3 of their journey: Diehappy (State Forest), up Orama
Road to Horseshoe Road and Scotchman’s Peak). –Names such as Diehappy and Scotchman’s are the ‘authentic’ names of forests in this area and
are so marked on many maps.
(Later in May) having completed my reading of Simon Winchester’s
Yangtze River book (much of that reading in clear light in the garden) I want
to hurry down there again because the light is even more perfect than it was
yesterday. These relatively dry and very clear autumn-almost-winter days are
rare enough for them to be treated with joyful respect. The light is crystal
clear, which is to say that the air is filled with all the necessary air stuff
and it also contains small winged insects and is more or less dry (wet air is
not crystal clear). The garden again today, is full of movement, particularly
the movements of leaves falling idly and taking their time to reach the ground
because there is no hastening breeze to hurry them. It is May and movement and
light in the garden make this the most desirable place and time on Earth and
not forgetting that this is the month of my birth.
And it’s also butterfly time in this part of the garden. It seems
unfair that butterflies live for so brief a time. For those who know the
garden, I’m behind and to the left of Belvedere Central with the early
afternoon sun tracking low behind me and warming my back. I can’t quite see the
nearby river tucked in beneath the edge of the lawn and the riverbank and have
fragmentary windows through the foliage of the downstream parts. Here there are
good patches of warming light (the higher trees near the road interrupt the
sunlight a couple of times and I move my two chairs to stay in radiant
touch—one chair for me, the other for books, and a clipboard/file filled with
unused lined paper from old exam answer books {I brought many of these
otherwise wasted pages when I moved here in 1984} and the emergency phone
{please come and rescue my battered self from beneath the fallen forest giant},
my glasses, my camera, my 27-years old mug {usually tea-filled, but the tea
sometimes replaced by a glassful of Shiraz}).
Yes, I know I wrote about the butterflies last month, but they’re still
flying sunny afternoon sorties and I continue seeing them as happy symbols of
hope. The intrepid fliers are often awake earlier in the day, but not many are
warmed up and ready for flying until about noon: it’s obvious that they love
warm flying conditions and sometimes will fly together in twos or threes (ought
I think of small groups as flights or
as squadrons, I wonder)?
–And although there are sundry small moths and other insects in the air
the small winged insects that I most enjoy seeing these days are invariably
those brown butterflies with the gaudy wing roundels. I don’t know what species
command the skies of ‘my’ garden. I do know that in this era and in this season
the majority of these beautiful little creatures are largely brown, a rich dark
chocolate or richly roasted (but not espresso roasted) coffee colour—more or
less the colour of dark chocolate or ground coffee and that they each have
yellow or pale straw coloured wing markings. They look striking in sunlight and every bit as beautiful as the wartime
Spitfire looked when filmed flying in clear air—and the butterflies,
particularly during a group or squadron exercise, can move with awesome speed: very tight turns, enormously fast changes of direction that would surely tear a real
aircraft frame apart! How on Earth do
they do that?
I take my blue clip board filled with writing paper, the scarcely begun
book about the Yarra, a copy of the Literary
Review that has been opened—just—once or twice and Anna Funder’s novel set
in Berlin (I’ve started to read this but for several reasons I haven’t been
travelling quite as easily inside this novel possibly because I well remember
some older novels that explored some of the issues that arose between the wars
or that examined themes about the lives of refugees in Europe (particularly
Paris) in the 1930s. I’m thinking of dusty old books like Erich Maria
Remarque’s Flotsam; All Quiet on the Western Front, Arch of Triumph; Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Fall of Paris. Some of these old hardcover
books were published during WW 11 and printed to “Book Production War Economy
Standard” when paper was scarce and the printing was tight and sometimes
difficult to read. I realise I’m not quite ready to read a new novel of those
times and perhaps I may have a need to re-read some of the older ones first. Ms
Funder is a writer I admire and so I’ll postpone her novel for now and return
to it later).
Outside in the garden the autumn sun is pouring down its effulgence
(how’s that for a clichéd phrase?) on
this little part of the world. I think how fortunate I am to be in this
radiance. I wonder if, when we die, it might be possible for us to be dead yet
still be able to somehow see the ocean of light arriving in waves from our
star? Being dead in the dark will be so bloody boring as to be perverse: as an
aspect or part of this universe, please note, I and Thee also are the universe for how can anything be
part of the whole without also being the
whole?
And I also take the kitchen scraps down to a compost site that the wild
creatures inspect for nourishing rejects before the environment is allowed to
process the remainder (night time operations that I hear as four-footed brawls,
but which I seldom witness). I farewell the kitchen scraps. One-handed I grab
up the green plastic garden chairs then, rushing to the light, I set myself up
and have barely got myself into a chair unscathed when I see my favourite
butterflies at all the popular winged insect altitudes, including millimetres
above the grass and ground covers. I leap up, unwrapping the camera from its
waterproof cover and begin stalking the fliers. Today they enjoy the advantage
of flying at about 5-m in bright sunlight—I write flying, but in reality they make bobbing flights (bob-flights?)
that look more like rapid jumps through the air and these movements are so
dashingly quick that the overall course of any flier looks impossible to
predict. I would enjoy knowing just how fast they move but will have to detour
from writing to research that.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
Robert Herrick, Hesperides,
‘To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.’
May 27 2012. When not finding excuses to loaf about in the sunny garden
I’m currently working on drafts of a novel, set here (of course) and which
feature the major protagonists from “The Summer River” and these drafts are
also intended to become the sequel to that unpublished story (!).
The title of the prior novel is also the title of a haiku by the 17th
century poet, Shiki. That poem and many others can be found in RH Blyth’s fine
book, Haiku Vol 3 Summer-Autumn
(Fields and Mountains). Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1950. Years ago a friend sent
me some photocopies of some pages from that book that nicely relate to
associated landscapes and waterscapes to be seen at Earthrise and nearby. I enjoy reading these excerpts from
that marvellous book because the poems are presented first in Japanese
characters then, second, in Japanese text and, third, in English translations.
Seeing the Japanese characters adds to my pleasure of seeing the transcriptions
in English. Although I can’t read the Japanese characters I like the ways that
they look and, it seems to me, the subtle way in which those characters
decorate my photocopied pages and strangely seem to influence my imagined
visualizing of the poem in English. That may seem an odd thing to write, but it
isn’t at all odd for me to think it. There may not be too many similarities
between the Japanese countryside and the Darkwood where I live, but rivers with
water-rounded stones seen only from bank to bank will be similar in many ways.
I’m trying to indicate that I like to think that when I visualize Japanese
rivers they don’t look like Australian rivers—beyond the banks (no gums; pines
in Japan; the somewhat similar casuarina or she-oak here help the
illusion).
The poems I have in mind are contained in a Field and Mountains section and the ones I most enjoy are English
translations of haiku about rivers and water. The notion above made explicit by
Blyth is one that I’m fond of because I see its reality so frequently here. For
example my morning walk takes me along the road and downriver to Richardson’s
bridge. The bridge is not well sited in my opinion and together with a concrete
approach that juts into the stream on the west side of the river the bridge is
an undeniable obstruction to the river’s flow and consequently the river flows
every which way.
At the bridge, more or less surrounded by the lively river, I take my
time to step over the baluster rail and stand on the walkway directly above the
torrent probing and winding to find its way and from where I can watch water in
motion over stones. To explain that more fully: at this time of the year the
rising sun shines at a low angle across the
river’s surface and through bubbles
and froth and an array of casuarina needles jumbled together between stones so
that the images of all these ‘objects’ are projected by sunlight, and somewhat
magnified down and through the shallow water beneath me and
on to the surfaces of large stones on the riverbed. Additionally there are
surface patterns on the river that are ephemeral: swirls made apparent by the
stream’s variable flowing and seen only when the viewer focuses on them (these
swirls and ripples are slight and look unmistakably black and are best seen on dull grey days from directly above on
the walkway). All of these projected patterns move continuously and so are continually altered or dynamically
changed by the changing flow and also when there is a breeze and when clouds
vary the strength of sunlight. I the seer or viewer see this moving exposition
simply by standing still and looking down and through the water to where the
patterns are altering. The patterns often look like colourful laminations in
the stones set free by the energy of sunlight. The passing river produces
accompanying water sounds and I’m privileged to be attending a sound and light
show.
By slightly moving my head a few centimetres on fine sunny mornings I
may access a second show being presented, this second one being more difficult
to see because it is almost background and because its nature is micro rather
than macro and anyone not actively paying attention by refocusing and scanning
may miss it altogether. I had altogether missed this Second View on many
occasions because although I was present and more or less fully conscious I was
not at all well focussed: I was seeing the light on tonnes of water rounded stones
flood-dumped over most of an otherwise flattened half hectare of riverbank.
Many of the stones were of many different sizes and shapes, some of which were
dry and others that were damp or wet and I became suddenly aware that there
were also many threads of what seems to be spider silk, some of the strands
being anchored to the timber bridge near my feet, but there were no visible webs, not one! As my eyes adjusted to this
new phenomenon I was able to see an increasing number of the threads that
stretched between stones and realised that I was able to see them at all simply
because they reflected sunlight. Spider silk, if that’s is what I’ve been
admiring, is only microns in diameter (a micron being one millionth of a
metre). (Such silken strands floating in clear air can only be seen at a
distance (e.g., 50-m away over the river from where I am sitting inside the
house writing) because reflected sunlight enables their visibility.
The more carefully I looked the more strands of silk I could see.
Perhaps were I to clamber down from the bridge walkway and peer closely with a
magnifier I might be fortunate enough to find webs and the master makers of the
silk threads, but I was more content to stand in the sun and to see with wonder
what Nature was displaying. A stone ‘field’ interconnected by silken cables may
not be everybody’s cup of tea but I was pleased to watch this for a long time
because the slightest movement of air would set this big network trembling and
glistering in the light. Do the threads constitute hunting devices intended as
very large open meshed nets to stop or stun flying insects? If so there might
then be a degree of cooperation between the many cable manufacturers such that
territoriality might be waived to allow several predators to share meals? What
other possible explanation could be offered if the silk cables are not traps? I
suppose I’d be stretching my imagination rather too far were I to suggest that
many small beasties (probably spiders) were intent on constructing a 1–km array
that would facilitate their detecting other galaxies or clusters of galaxies so
I’d best not proceed down that track…
When at last I turn away from these river shows and prepare to walk
homeward I note that the tallest and most mature-looking casuarinas near the
bridge all support stag horn and elk-horn and bird’s-nest ferns high on their
trunks; some of these green living forms offer shapes that might have excited
Gaudi when he was visualizing the building of the Sagrada Famillia cathedral in
Barcelona. And if I change my focus yet again I can take a few more seconds or
minutes to admire the air show being staged by daredevil swallows that fly
dartingly up and down the river, over and under the bridge, undoubtedly
enjoying their acrobatics as much as they probably love hunting and eating on
the wing.
Ah! Time to go: it’s the last day of May and official winter only hours
away and the presses are waiting to roll. Be well, all.
Best wishes, Don.
--And here’s a message from my friend, Russell Atkinson:
The latest blog on www.theoldestako.wordpress.com
about the light of your life has been posted with strange photos. Are
shadows things? What do you think? Plus more maxims for mystics and some up-to-date
words from a Japanese sage C 300BC
