The Earthrise Diary (May 2012)

                             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