blue is my colour

Once again, autumn descends in a flash, last Saturday, we were sweating it out in the city, listening to street musicians, licking ice cream and today, we are debating whether it's time to heat the house. When I set off on my bicycle this morning, I put on mittens! Not the thick ones but mittens nevertheless.

It's been a bit of an exhausting week what with blood and stool sampling and gruesome results and all that it entails (change of meds, mostly) and the urge to basically sleep A Lot. And there I was about to celebrate a month without doctor's visits. Still the relief when a slightly alarming diagnosis confirms what my body had been telling me in recent week, with increasing urgency. But hey, I am an old hand at this game and so did all the right things incl. a three hour wait in A&E.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Virginia Woolf

And once again, there it is staring into my face, this for-ever narrative, unable to find a linear explanation for the state I am in.  It's fruitless, at this point in time, apparently inevitable, but I admit, it's hard, so hard to carry it like a middle name, the disease, the diagnosis, the inevitable consequences. Plus, the new angle, the one when . . .  at your age . . . I must apparently not expect too much improvement.

But then again, I do know there are ways to change it, even if there may be circumstances that won't make change possible (like, your immune system is fucked), I can and will, once again, challenge the way I view it, the way I place myself in it, battle with the victimhood I so easily could accept. The way it seems inevitable. Only, I just don't have the energy for it right now. It'll come. I am in a safe place. We harvested all the pears, all the apples and all the pumpkins. What could possibly go wrong.

To celebrate life and to cheer myself up, I am seriously contemplating to purchase this dress all the way from Jaipur, Rajasthan, India ( https://www.nilajaipur.com/). Blue is my favourite colour. In our conversations, we establish this fact almost daily, the grandchild and myself. The grandchild does a lot of drawing and colouring.

 

stay awake and tender

 

winter bird food in the making

 It is better to wear out than to rust out. Did I read that or did somebody say this?

Anyway, I am working hard on the wearing out bit, not a chance of rusting. The purpose of my activities is to fall into bed exhausted at the end of the day after having done too many things to remember. But I do spend a considerable amount of my time in the basement sorting and cleaning with the vague hope that I will feel so much better once the rooms underneath our living space will resemble something Martha Stewart would approve of. Also, the new washing machine needs a suitable environment and we are running out of storage space for the bottled pears and the gallons of freshly produced grape juice. 

the onset of winter veg, aka brassica season

 

I also went on my walk before lunch and cycled before dinner. While I enjoyed both activities, I had neither lunch nor dinner as this whole thing about energy dense nutrition is currently not quite coming along as planned. I am working on it though and chopped up the first fat pumpkin for soup tomorrow.

Earlier, I baked an apple pie, the old fashioned way, following a recipe I cut from The Irish Times about 40 years ago. R enjoyed it immensely, he said. I enjoyed watching him eat. Some days, I feel very sorry for myself because of all the restrictions a twisted intestine brings but most days I remind myself of all the weird and wonderful meals I have had and how lucky I have been. Or should I say, entitled.

These are my thoughts in preparation of the next gastrology appointment on Thursday. My expectations are low but I have started the requested food intake diary.

general mayhem with asters

 

Ok so, the state of the world. There are people in this country who are adamant that not all populists, right-wing zealots are nazis just as not all members of Hitler's national socialist party were nazis (good grief, it's in the name, folks) and that one must distinguish and not lump them all together, but that obviously all immigrants are terrorists and/or criminals and therefore, we must shut our borders, regardless of international or EU law or whatever.

Also, according to these not-all-are-nazis smartasses, those-up-there should stop telling the people what to do and what is really needed is a strong leader. Spot the error.

Two things I found:

 and what a surprise

autumn

Today was the last day of summer. Rain and a considerable drop in temperatures forecast from tomorrow. I spent the day outside nursing my aches and pains and my foul mood. It has been a wonderful late summer day, clear air, plenty of wasps, the kids from the Baptist family across the garden playing Pharao and Joseph, or maybe Moses. They were hysterically shouting attack and I found you! 

I just sat there most of the time, dozing and breathing and keeping it together, after a bad night. Things can only get better.

On Friday, I stood in a large crowd in the city listening to an open-air performance of Beethoven's 5th symphony.  The stage was placed right beside the cathedral, built in the 11th century as the burial place for two Roman soldiers who were beheaded by the Roman emperor of the time because they had converted to Christianity or something like that. Every religion has its martyrs and these two, Florentius and Cassius, eventually became the city's saints. Still two of the most popular boy names here.

Anyway, not my saints. Also the fact that Beethoven himself was actually born here in this city does not affect me the way it does the endless stream of mostly Asian tourists who patiently wait in long queues to document on social media that they are indeed in front of his former house or have climbed on one of the various statues of the man and purchase all the touristy stuff laid out for them, including Beethoven tea and Beethoven wine and Beethoven chocolates, also Beethoven tote bags and Beethoven socks, obviously.

While I was listening to the second movement of Beethoven's fifth, I looked up and the sky was just beautiful, all sunset pink without a cloud and a flock of pigeons circling the cathedral towers. The second movement of this symphony is one of my favourite pieces of classical music - and I am not a classical music person - and as always, it made me cry a bit. But maybe also, because I was thinking of how much my father would have enjoyed that evening, the air, the light, the birds, the music. I do miss him at times.

 

 

Tomorrow, a new washing machine will be delivered to us. This is a milestone, as always, and hopefully it will be the last washing machine in our lives. It will be washing machine number six. I am now going to write about all the washing machines we ever had, so if this is not your thing, you can stop reading here.

As background, I must mention that after years of scraping together sufficient means to feed the laundrettes during my student years, a real personal washing machine was a game changer.

The first one was a large top loader and it wasn't really ours. Its purchase had been decided after a heated debate during a housing meeting of the commune we lived in at the time and top loader because one of the communards had strong feelings regarding cats being accidentally locked inside and washed to death. It basically ran all the time because it was used by various groups and committees and campaigns. Approval for all voted for at house meetings, of course. 

The second washing machine was smuggled past the customs in that tiny African country we had moved to. Initially, we did what our neighbours did, we bashed our soapy laundry onto a concrete slab behind the house and provided there was no water stoppage on the day, spent ages rinsing it. When I heard through the grapevine that a consignment of Yugoslav washing machines was due to arrive at the port, we developed a complicated scheme whereby I posed as the girlfriend of a newly arrived Belgian diplomat we had bribed with drinks and excellent freshly grilled tuna on banana leaves to insist that a new washing machine was urgently required by me, his future diplomatic wife, with full approval of his embassy since no ordinary person would have a chance to even look at such an item without large sums changing hands. Probably everybody involved - from the customs officials to the stamp duty collector and the taxi driver and their families and friends - spotted the ruse and as expected, our standing in society was elevated by a couple of steps with much nodding and winking.

For a while, this washing machine was a major attraction and we had many visitors to sit and watch until it eventually, luckily only a few weeks before our departure, met a dramatic end when a couple of fat cockroaches electrocuted themselves in a nest they had built behind the dial switch, almost setting the house on fire. 

Number three was purchased in a mad rush on Boxing Day after our return to Dublin, the day of the year when people get up really early to avail of the xmas sale bargains, we opted for the cheapest model. When we moved to Germany a year later, number four had to be purchased as the cheapness of our Irish model did not comply with the safety stipulations of our landlord at the time. And number five was purchased to celebrate the mortgage approval when we bought the house and gave up its ghost after many useful years in the basement laundry room.

Exciting stuff, yes?

encounters

A hot, humid rainy day. I brush up the remains of August, I am ready for autumn, I think. The artist living across from us, the one with a mental health issue, has been calling out from her upstairs window for at least an hour, her long grey curly hair is getting wet in the rainy gusts. It's a high pitched lament about something. I occasionally catch the odd word, nazi, pig, poison, cats. She does this at night as well and it will only be a matter of time before someone calls the police again. Last week as I saw her opening her front door, I briefly considered walking up to her and turned into her driveway - which is covered in small statues and crockery and bowls filled with broken glass and many sheets of paper with faded messages - but as I got closer, she lifted a hammer she had in her hand and hissed at me. I am considering calling social services although it will probably result in her being sectioned again and what do I know.

Last night I attended a meeting organised by our city's climate change committee where the various goals and achievments were patiently explained - once again. The 1000 fruit trees planted this year, the solar panels now on almost all supermarkets and school buildings, that kind of stuff. The first remark at the question and answer session afterwards came from an elderly guy who basically explained that it's all too little too late and what about the cherry trees in his street and anyway, who can insulate old buildings and all the faults of heat pumps and so on. Thankfully, someone cut him short with "if not now then when" and I realised that I had held my breath while he spoke, I was so mad. Eventually, during the informal part, with my glass of water in hand, I approached him with a couple of suggestions, especially regarding the cherry trees but he cut me short when I mentioned a website - I am not on social media! - and when I offered him a cell phone number of the tree activist group, he fiercely shook his head because, no cell phones either. I gave up.

We went walking a while back, deep in the country and through the woods. People have been living here since the 16th century.

 And write their life motto on the truss beams. 

 

This one is in the local dialect Allzevell es onjesond - too much is unhealthy.

 

balancing

 

There were many things I wanted to do this week, outings, odd jobs around the house and garden, a spectacular walk down a deep ravine on the other side of the river but by Tuesday evening, after I finally got my fully repaired bicycle back (it was like greeting a long lost friend) it became apparent that reality doesn’t need me to help operate it. It gets along just fine without my input and as the almost forgotten but most familiar first waves of vertigo began to wash over me, I had to realise that life right now is not going to be my problem to be solved. And so to bed and much sleep and drowsy days struggling with balance.

 

The positive aspect, much appreciated, is that being retired, I don't have to crawl to a doctor to get a sick certificate which then has to be sent to the employer in order to get paid while recovering. 

 

By the end of day two, I was back sitting upright and reading wonderous stuff.

 

Like this:

    I was wondering about the pyramids in Egypt. Why are there three pyramids?  . . . And I didn’t know very much about it, but . . .  I made this thought experiment: I would bet that they were not built like one pyramid, and then 500 years later, another pyramid. I bet it was just one crazy period when they made these three pyramids, because it’s not possible to build one pyramid. If you’re going to build one pyramid and have 40,000 people build a pyramid for forty years, you don’t stop doing that. You don’t just say, “Thank you, you can go home now,” because if you are building a pyramid with 40,000 people, for forty years, that’s what your economy is about. It’s about building pyramids.

    You have, suddenly, generations, because people lived a shorter life then. So suddenly you have two or three generations that don’t remember anything other than working on this pyramid, and the whole supply chain of your country is about making the ropes, cutting the stones—the whole hierarchy of the society is about where you are in building the pyramid, from the chief architect, to the lowest slave, to the people supplying this structure. If you stop building a pyramid, you have chaos. If you just say, “Go home now.” You don’t tell people just to go home and do something, because they have been used to having an assigned job for forty years. They’ll ask, “What do I do now?” Naturally, they start building another pyramid, because that’s the only way to keep the society and the structure whole, and after eighty years, nobody even has the idea that there should not be another pyramid. It’s just a question of how much bigger the pyramid should be, so it’s not until they have built the third pyramid that some people start scratching their heads, like OK, so we’re going to build a fourth? A fifth? Can this go on like this?

    And they hear rumors from Greece where not everyone is a slave, just every other person is a slave. And they have these amphitheaters, and they watch tragedies, so they get this news about alternative ways of life. Then I looked into the archaeology research, and it was actually true. The pyramids, the Great Giza Pyramids, were built in a crazy span of 120 years, and I think that now, with the climate strikes, that we finally have a generation that is seriously questioning.

    They don’t want to build pyramids anymore, and they don’t see the sense of it, and they don’t understand, why am I toiling my whole life, dragging myself to some job, just to have this metal case around me that we call cars? Why are we putting all these resources into these roads, and highways, and these ramps, and all this? They’re questioning everything, the foundations of what we are doing and why we’re doing it, because they see the damage of it, so I think that this generation that is now climate striking will bring the change on a much faster level than we’ve seen before, that is, change in how we eat and how we dress. Their dreams will be different from the dreams that we had, because their dreams are against a real threat.

 Andri Snær Magnason

hopefulness is a warrior emotion

Over breakfast this morning on the patio, we reminded each other that has been 45 years since we started our life together, during an unseasonally warm, almost hot August way out in the west of Ireland, Connemara. It is what it is.

While the days continue to be hot and muggy, the mornings are pleasantly cool now, with the sun rising later allowing for morning shadow beside the pear trees on the patio. Strange as it is, the wasps and bees are keeping their distance. We invited neighbours and their friends to help themselves to the Victoria plums at their own risk (re insects and ladder) and people have picked buckets of them. There's still loads left, higher up. Tomorrow, I will look at a second hand automatic preserver someone down the road is selling. This should solve the pear situation.

It's been a hard week, my bicycle has been in for service/repair for two weeks now. I am bereft. 

My food intake has been dismal. We are discussing long distance travel now in light of this and agreed that I need to seek medical opinion first. I can see myself in some airport transit lounge hugging my bloated abdomen - not.

So this here offers some balm.

solastalgia

 

Just after 10 am in the morning. All the shades are down, the house is cool and dark-ish, while outside it's getting hotter and hotter. I thought myself very clever and went for an hour's walk along the river in the early sunlit morning before breakfast and returned home with sweat dripping from my nose. It's the kind of heat when I would tie my hair up if it was long enough.

I am now sharing the room with one fly and an almost silently whirring stand-up fan. 

A week ago, while standing on a ladder picking ripe mirabelle plums, I was stung by at least one bee and maybe a couple of wasp simultaneously and all that within seconds. I get a lot of mileage out of that fact. I also had to go to the GP for the appropriate medical attention because my heart when out of rhythm for a good while and the left hand, where most of the action took place, was a swollen red balloon. We counted six stings in fingers and thumb, all of which are still in there and itching but I can use my hand again. So, yesterday, I picked a couple more mirabelle plums and humbly sacrificed the remaining lot to our insect rulers.

 

In reality, I have a hard time eating or rather, digesting fresh ripe fruit and this is sad, really sad, but needs must. The third expert opinion still outstanding, I have resigned to the shape of things and the limited diet options and decided to just get on with it.

 

We are in a debate about long distance travel and family visits and the CO2 emissions of twice 33 hrs flying across the planet and personal principles and the future of our grandchild and all other grandchildren in this world and responsibilities and excuses and what if not now and but the planes fly anyway and and. Currently, the man is getting deeper involved into scientist4future protests while I am trying to fool myself with a deal that involves looking at flight options and going completely vegan. Watch this space.

Solastalgia is a neologism, formed by the combination of the Latin words sōlācium (comfort) and the Greek root -algia (pain, suffering, grief), that describes a form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change. It is best described as the lived experience of negatively perceived environmental change. A distinction can be made between solastalgia linked to distress about what is in the process of negatively perceived change and eco-anxiety linked to what may happen in the future (associated with "pre-traumatic stress", in reference to post-traumatic stress).

found somewhere

 

 

 

 

fruit trees and ants and a penguin

 

abundant sloe (blackthorn) harvest this year, will soon become liqueur

Today, I got the shakes, which is what I call a day with no get-up-and-go, no energy, when every task has to be reduced to its minimum. These days come and go. I've picked a handful of blueberries and a bowl of mirabelle plums before it got too hot to rummage in the garden. R bravely trimmed the hedge. My mood is lousy, I am prone to angry arguments and have been sulking a bit. Cannot remember what caused it but at least I have a good excuse to withdraw and do nothing, not even thinking.

 

almost too many pears

 

and plums

and the vegetables

Here are some thoughts and stuff that came my way recently. I listened to a lecture by Nigerian philosopher/psychologist Bayo Akomolafe:

In a death spiral (otherwise called ant milling), ants seemingly become fixated in a lethal cycle of sorts. Entomologists believe that some kind of pheromonic accident occurs when the cartographical chemical loops on itself, compelling the ants to keep going round and round, probably intensifying their pacing in the hopes of arriving home.

But they rarely do. If you were an ant, it would be very difficult to shake yourself free from the trance of a death spiral. On the other hand, it would be dangerously easy – it seems – to believe that the next unrelenting step would bring you closer home. In most death spirals observed, the ants march in their crazed continuity, sometimes for days, come rain or sunshine, and then die out of exhaustion, the hopes for a safe arrival lingering over their little bodies like pheromonic ghosts unsure of where to go.

The ant’s death spiral is a multi-species phenomenon, involving human onlookers and their speculations about ant society. Who knows how it comes to be that ants seemingly march in a circle – sometimes as large as a football stadium or as small as could fit on an office table – and then die afterwards? It’s impossible to say for sure what is happening. And yet, we would be remiss if we didn’t heed the ancient warning to learn from ants.

What do death spirals tell us about the constancy of the modern quest for solutions to critical civilization-baring problems and the subsequent realizations that these applications often retain the logic of the problem, perhaps even fortifying the conditions that led to the issue in the first place? Perhaps we can begin to speak about ‘anthro-milling’, not just ant milling: the enlistment of expertise and human agency in territorial patterns of repetition. A trance that whispers we’ll be home – if only we persist in what we already know…

Because one theoretical way an ant can break out of its trance is if it became infected by a fungus, like ophiocordyceps unilateralis – the zombie-ant fungus. Once infected, an ant breaks away from holding patterns and strays, getting lost in the forest, far away from incarcerating concepts of arrival and the anxieties about identity. Somewhere mandible-deep in the underside of a leaf, the zombie-ant becomes an art-form for fungal sporulation – no longer ant nor fungus, but now a curious living-dying betweenness that produces new kinds of worlds.

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is for us – citizens gestating in modern demise – to think along with the monstrous, to think along with the edges, to map out new realities.

Bayo Akomolafe

And I listened to a conversation between Werner Herzog and the physicist Lawrence Krauss. I could listen to Werner Herzog's voice forever, his Bavarian-English accent is a thing of beauty. It's a long conversation and I listened to it in instalments while I knitted the grandchild's cardigan. There are of course many anecdotes, stories from his childhood and weird stuff that happened when directing his movies and documentaries and writing opera scripts and books and so on. Here's one story about his grandfather:

". . . my grandfather . . . (in) the last years of his life, he was demented or insane. And he did not recognise his wife anymore and he would sit at dinner table and address her as madam . . .  and one night he folded his napkin, put his cutlery cleanly on the table, stood up and bowed to her. And he said to her: Madam, if I were not married, I would ask for your hand."

In this conversation, there's no mention of the existential penguin from the documentary "Encounters at the End of the World" (2007), which in my humble opinion is essential viewing. (Full video is available on youtube, click here.) So here's the penguin, he/she has been part of my imagination for years, Werner Herzog's accent, by the way, is nothing like my English accent despite the fact that I also come from Bavaria - but learned to speak English in Ireland.

only a dream and lots of walking

Last night or rather early this morning, I had the weirdest dream and I don't usually remember my dreams and when I do, I don't really pay any attention to them. I used to when I was young and innocent, in a searching kind of way, and for a while even wrote them down in a pretty little dream diary - which eventually made its way into the deep below the bed world.

In today's dream, I was visited by a medical crew, a group of smart looking youngsters in uniforms, who stood around my bed reading out various diagnoses and observations from charts. I knew right away that this was a scam and somehow ended up talking with them and it turned out they were desperate, had been forced into this. Meanwhile R had called the police and in the end, we both helped them to get away safely before the police arrived. Seriously, what?

So last week I did a LOT of walking, in fact every day, including up a very steep hill on a medieval stations-of-the-cross walk through ancient forest across the river, complete with statues and crosses and I seriously suffered along what with the heat and the climb but I made it and on top, joined the lazy tourists who had driven up there. I usually walk alone or with R who doesn't talk much but points out plants and fungi and stuff like that in his best science teacher mode. But on Friday, I went for a longish walk with a friend who had just been through a nasty divorce and in the end we had walked for close to  three hours round and round the large central cemetery until she had most of it off her chest. We also noted how there are less graves and increasingly more (managed) wild flower fields and bee hives and biotopes ponds which I was informed is due to outrageous funeral and burial plot maintenance costs.

It's the time of summer when we hand out courgettes and pears to anybody silly enough to come near us and possibly some neighbours have gone into hiding by now.

A few thoughts on recent events and why there is no time to rest and sit back and laugh about silly social media memes.

. . .  misogyny is one of the most dangerous weapons on Earth. The best friend of authoritarians and oligarchs. The handmaiden of tyrants.

. . .  it’s misogyny – networked misogyny across multiple global platforms that will earn their tech bro owners billions upon billions of dollars – that is going to decide the 2024 election. And it’s misogyny that’s going to dictate the future of Nato, the outcome of the war in Ukraine, whether we have peace in Europe or more war. And because this is going to be a firehose that will be directed at a single woman – Kamala Harris – it will be misogyny multiplied: misogyny plus racism, the most toxic combination of all.

They used to call us witches because we knew shit. We still do. That’s what makes us so powerful. And dangerous. 

So, here’s what I need you to do now: to shut up and sit down and listen. You are at risk. We are all at risk. Because this is what I know: bad things are coming. We are in a code red emergency.

Because misogyny isn’t bad people saying bad things that may hurt your feelings. (Though it might.) And misogyny isn’t about silencing women. (Though it does.)

Misogyny is now one of the deadliest weapons on Earth. Misogyny is a dirty bomb in the heart of our information system. Misogyny is electoral interference. Misogyny is a national security threat so lethal we can’t even see it.

Because misogyny is invisible. It’s never about all women, it’s always just about one particular, disagreeable woman who just happens to not be very likeable. Or competent. Who is loud or “shrill” or annoying or who got the job because she slept with a man. Or because she was a diversity hire. A woman who can’t even run her own house let alone a country. A woman who is “nasty”. A woman who isn’t and cannot be the strong leader a nation needs. Enjoy the sunshine of the Kamala moment. Breathe in the clean fresh air of facts, of evidence, of information. Of hope. Before the toxic social media chimneys crank up the content. Because shortly, the particulates will arrive, will silently and stealthily and invisibly start clogging our bronchial pathways even as the billionaire bros who own the platforms rake in record profits. 

Soon, we won’t even notice. It’ll just be part of the air that we breathe. A choking toxic misogynistic stew that will silently pour over the culture war trenches like mustard gas. Darkness is coming. This is the world social media created. And we’re much further out than we thought.

Carol Cadwalladr

and there's always that

I would be puzzled to know, if I were in Putin’s position, how to run Donald Trump as my asset. I have no doubt that they have obtained him, and they could probably blow him out of the water whenever they felt like it, but I think they are having much more fun feeding his contradictions and con-tributing to the chaos. ‘The terrifying thing is, the closer he draws to Putin, the more he lies and denies, the stronger his support among the faithful. You don't need to own Trump as an agent. You just have to let him run.

John le Carré
Letter to William Burroughs
23rd July 2018

source: Shaun Usher, Letters of Note

death and a crater

It's sticky and thundery. In the last couple of days, I went for the walk first thing in the morning to avoid the heat. Not sure whether that's the best idea as I end up getting the shakes half way but this is suburbia and there are many benches and walls and stuff for a short rest. A few days ago, I bravely walked the perimeter of an ancient volcanic crater. It only took us three hours of climbing through dense forest but the water was intensely green and still and wonderful to look at. We were the only people around so nobody could hear my whiny voice complaining about the heat and the insects and that R was walking too fast.

Malbergsee

Mostly, I am cranky and seem to have lost my manners but my excuse is that I have been living on a boring bland diet for almost a year now with not a chance of improvement. At least I can do coffee and I am a sucker for porridge and toast. The man has developed some bland soup recipes with fresh garden produce incl. herbs. Soups are really boiled green smoothies, I tell myself. And they do taste good. Good enough. A decent week is one with little or no weight loss. And concentrating on that helps to ignore some other symptoms the expert has noted at the regular check-up last week, at least for while. 

blackberries almost ready

Today, we cycled to the fancy French cafe, in between heavy thunder storms, and while we sat under the awning sipping gorgeous cafe au lait, discussed burial options and costs. I had this dream that both of us had died and our daughter arrived here, jet-lagged and, out of her mind, began tearing her beautiful hair out. 

So we are now putting together instructions and the necessary funds. Current favourite is getting an undertaker from across the border in Holland, which unlike here, would allow collecting the ashes and spreading it where and when anybody wants to. While in Germany the laws are much stricter, you cannot spread ashes willy nilly everywhere. We next imagined her trying to get two urns past NZ customs and started to have the giggles. Anyway, lots to investigate and we are serious about preparations.

poor shot of the bees

We are both old now, more or less, and getting used to it. And while we are clearing out stuff, sorting through papers, preparing our burials, it's just old age, it's not waiting for death, it's life. Our lives will come to an end, it has happened to billions of people before and it will happen to everyone alive, everyone we know. The man is fit and healthy, I am not. Anything can happen.

summer and superpowers and the life of Riley

 

I am very proud of my neat herb bed

It's been very hot, often very windy and in between close and grey and humid. We had heavy thunderstorms, heavy rain and today, it's sticky and grey. Whatever we may think, the garden is doing extremely well. Until a few days ago, I sat for a while every morning shelling the peas that R brought me. Now they are either eaten or in the freezer. We continue to argue about the soft fruit which according to my thinking should be eaten straight away in large handfulls while he believes in freezing it for a rainy cold day of jam making. Let's see what happens when the plums and the peaches are ripe. Any day now. Also, runner beans and courgettes and tomatoes and some lovely fat beetroot. It's also an excellent apricot year but they need to be washed - because stinkbugs. The man has started a big jar of cassis with the fat blackcurrants.

no more peas

Early in the mornings and again after sunset, if we are very quiet for a moment, we can hear the snails holding their fat bellies with laughter. They know, of course, that we grow lettuce and basil, fennel, kohlrabi and beetroot for ourselves. They think it's all a big joke. But we are not without our own menacing thoughts and means and, what can I say, ready for war and it looks like we are winning. But hush, let's not jinx it.

this is the covid patch, the bit we've left idle since lockdown

I used to be that person who could be observed devising schemes for ants, fruit flies or spiders to find their way out of the kitchen without loss of lives. On good days, you could hear me talking to them with heartfelt encouragement, even giving the last ant group a gentle push with the small duster. All for my good karma.

tons of finger aubergines

But honestly, the spiritual and I have not become friends. I probably lack the discipline, or my despair of the world has subsided somewhat. In the limited human reality, I now also find things that make me happy and keep me going. Actually, I always have. I wouldn't be where I am now if it was all gloom and despair. It's just so much more fun to complain and moan.

I've been thinking about all that recently. Someone, a long time ago, told me that not being religious (he meant not being a catholic) was cheap and stupid, leaving the hard work of salvation and whatever else to others while living the life of Riley (who and where is Riley now?). That I should be ashamed of myself. Another person, in a more serious debate, was confounded by the fact that my child, who was not raised with the fear of god and nothing about sins, was spending huge chunks of her time and energy doing what he called good, selfless work. How could this be, her wondered. A heathen child! Indeed. Dear gods, I am so proud of this heathen child, you have no idea.

I'll never understand it but I admit there are days when I wish I could just hand it all - fears, hopes, needs - to some higher force and say, get on with it, give me the rules and I'll fit them in. If only. But then again, how dull and predictable.

I wonder what the gods had in mind when they created Tapinoma magnum, an invasive ant species that used to live predominantly in the Mediterranean basin but has - thank you climate change! - found its way closer and closer to my home. Not there yet, but already established in towns and gardens at the southern end of the big river we live on. Their nests grow to several metres in size and the colonies comprise millions of workers and hundreds of queens. And individual colonies do not fight each other like other species, they co-operate and form the United States of Antsikia, an insect superpower. The shape of things to come. 

observations from the other side of the Atlantic

In a perfect world, people would focus on the political content and, despite Biden's suboptimal form on the day, would take time to read the transcript of the debate, check the truthfulness of the statements made by both candidates and analyse on this basis who has the better plan for the US. If that was the case, I am guessing Joe Biden could win the election in a landslide. The fact that he himself is by now old and slow would be irrelevant, because he would gather around him an extremely capable team.

Perhaps the central weakness of democracies is that they are based on the assumption that the majority of the people acts on the basis of rational considerations, able to justify their voting decisions with arguments and willing to discuss them in the hope that the best argument will ultimately prevail.

Instead: A coup, and the junta wears judges' robes. And the media has a field day.

 

Also this:

Trump's Fetish about Abortion at Term
And why the media is unfit to ask about abortion in a debate (click on this headline to read the full post by the excellent Jen Gunter)

These Trump abortion lies about “after birth” abortion and abortions at eight or nine months are shiny things for the media because they evoke imagery of wanton, careless women and evil doctors. As if at 36 or so weeks (because the women getting these abortions at or close to term were previously too busy with their hair and nails), scores of women finally book a $99 abortion they easily found on their For You Page on TikTok. Unless they can find a friend who was also just too bored to get her abortion earlier, then they can take advantage of the Monday BOGO abortion deal and split the cost. And if they can’t make it to the local strip mall abortuary because of important reasons, such as shopping, for an extra $20, after they deliver, they will get the doctor to kill their now newborn as part of some kind of package deal. It is a grotesque conspiracy theory, and to let these lies fly by several times in the debate falsely implies they are grounded in reality instead of what they are–fascist lies shrouded in double-speak. And unfortunately, replying to them rationally in real time doesn’t work.

And the media can’t help themselves, because a shiny thing from Trump is just the best. 

apricot days

It's that time of a summer when the lime trees (linden to some) are in flower sharing their intense fragrance, especially at night when we open up the house after a hot day. This suburb is lime tree suburb with street after street lined by old tall trees. There's no point washing cars or windows are whatever until they are done. It is spectacular despite the fact that at times, the intesity of the fragrance borders on cat's piss.

When my daughter was a moody teenager, we went for a couple of days to Paris since we guessed - rightly so - that our days of family outings were numbered. There was some parental apprehension due to her teenage mood swings and her unwillingness to even look at a guide book or show the slightest interest in what Paris may have to offer. As it happened, her parents had a massive argument the morning of our departure which resulted in this grown up teenager sitting between two sulking adults who refused to speak to each other. Things improved dramatically after we arrived thanks to the thousands of Paris's lime trees in flower and we had some very fine days of which we speak fondly to this day. 

Meanwhile, I visited a street music festival, the open air opera festival and the long night of the museums, not all on the same day, and was completely washed out for three or ten days. Well worth it though. 

And I've gone and had the second or maybe fourth opinion from another team of experts. This one doesn't want to go for surgery - yet - and anyway, would not be able to promise any marked improvement as a result. So it's more of the same, with variations, a sprinkling of this and that and No More Weight Loss. I am still relieved about the no surgery bit.  As it stands, you just have to accommodate each new bit of knowledge, each new limitation, each new experience, each new fear that comes your way. Even if you die a little. What else is there. Porridge, a small handful of freshly picked berries, yoghurt and if you are the fool I am, too many juicy, ripe Spanish apricots resulting in a sleepless night.

These three things have come my way.

A poem.

 Hello to you all, how do you live?

Rabbit :
We live in small groups, have no fixed partnerships.
Build widely branching tunnel systems,
in which our young are born, naked and blind.
We still reproduce when imprisoned.

Hare :
I live solitary. Sleep in a shallow hollow.
My offspring are born with fur and open eyes.
I have never been domesticated.

Humans :
We don’t quite know.
Until we have found out, we wage wars.


Lin May Saeed

According to her website, Saeed believed we humans had a lot to learn from animals, and her favourite daydream was imagining aliens and animals coming together to meet humans to give them a masterclass called ‘How Not To Mess It Up’.

A bit of music.

And a short film. (More info about it, click here.)

working on exhale

 

harvest time mostly daily

It seems that I’ve developed a habit of holding my breath. I must remind myself to exhale. I forget what my default setting used to be. It's the strangest thing, chronic illness and its long tail of sidelines and risks. The way it doesn't stay the same despite the same old same old stuff day in and day out, the tediousness of the restrictions and vigilance that the medications dictate. Until there's the day when it's become more shit than before, in comparison. When I realise this has been going on for some time, while I distracted myself with pretending to be healthy and jolly.

 

trying to stay on top of it

Well, if there's one thing I should have figured out in the last decade, it's that it's rare to get through life in general without any difficult phases. In one form or another, at some point, shit happens along the way and we have to hold our nerve, get our cool, stop ourselves from falling apart. And I am at that point, I think. In all these years of being ill, as long and hard and also as wild and happy as they have been so far, there has never been a day when I am not reminded of being ill. As much as have tried, initially, there's no way to switch it off. It's always something and right now it's a bit more. It is that time again when I need to sit with all the trouble until I come to reach some balance within. Regardless or probably especially because of the surgery looming on the horizon.

very happy with the apricots

The week has been hard, more than I want to admit it, I have battled daily through long hours of cramps and colic determined to not let this rule my day and stop me from doing stuff. But Thursday was the day, I packed it in and have since stayed home, no walk, no cycle, no gardening. Instead, I sleep in the afternoons and otherwise sit on the patio doing nothing at all. When it comes to food, I pick something from the slim list of tolerables with grim determination just to get some energy, protein, fibre. The nutritionist declared to be at the end of wisdom, handed me lists of recipes for bland soups and variations of watery porridge. Her wisdom was good nevertheless and I am grateful. On Wednesday, I handed over all my medical reports and stuff to the next set of surgeons who will now deliberate options prior to next week's scheduled appointment. Sounds great but I fear it will turn out that on Tuesday, some exhausted junior doctor will quickly glance through the file and ask the same questions again and I will reply with the same old list of concerns and then there will be that moment of irritation when I cite the medical research papers on the risks of surgery option 1, 2 and 3 in patients on immune suppression. I usually smile apologetically when they realise that I am a patient with a rare autoimmune disease, one they have heard about maybe once during training and then I usually and briefly explain that due to my long work experience I have access to and experience in checking and even interpreting relevant data. But still, there will be that sigh and oh shit etc.

the front, there have been complaints about it being too much of a jungle

And yet, and yet and yet. The garden is bliss, I walk around and pick s small handful of berries. Wonderful people come and sit with me, bringing fresh cherries, flowers, laughter and talk. I nibbled some cherries, too many, and pay the price but it was worth it.

I swear when this is over and sorted, I'll design the ultimate luxury food book, one that celebrate all the delicious, spicy, sweet, fatty, rich dishes I can only dream of ever eating again.

 

Hold hard this infirmity.
It defines you. You are old.
Now fix yourself in summer,
In thickets of ripe berries,
And venture toward the ridge
Where you were born. Await there
The setting sun. Be alive
To that old conflagration
One more time. Mortality
Is your shadow and your shade.
Translate yourself to spirit;
Be present on your journey.
Keep to the trees and waters.
Be the singing of the soil.


N. Scott Momaday

my bit for democracy

After several days, weeks (?) of heavy rain, we finally have a couple of good sunny hot days. Enough to go wandering about before sunset and dip into the various small local art festivals and open air concerts. I spent a few hours wandering about at the "Long Gallery Night" looking at art objects and nibbling the finger food, pretending I was actually flush enough to purchase anything, while R topped up on the free drinks.

The excitement of suburban living.

Yesterday, we received a big box of organic apricots directly from Analucia thanks to crowdfarming, one of the best ideas that have come into our lives.

Today are the European elections. A long time ago, decent people dreamed of introducing free, equal and secret suffrage in Europe. At the time and even today, plenty of opponents think this was a mad, even bad idea. But today on the continent whose history has been characterised by wars and more wars, where only 80 years ago, the allied forces landed on its beaches to set out and defeat the nazis, people living in 27 countries are now able to vote in unison for a common parliament.  I know that to some the EU is nothing but a large corrupt corporation only interested in setting silly and divisive rules.

Many people vote because they think it will create the world they want to see. I don't think that. Today, I voted against the ugly new fascists raising their heads. Because if you stay asleep in democracy you will wake up in dictatorship.

Human beings are good. I am convinced that we are constructed in such a way that we want to get along well with our fellow human beings. For some, the hardware is damaged. Through violence, abuse, neglect, mental illness or just because. And then the software crashes. In the normal population, around two per cent of all people are psychopaths, very few of whom are in prison. Many have a much bigger playground, they can become CEOs, US presidents or dictators in the Kremlin. And we can only handle them if we are not divided into bitsy little countries bitching about each other.

Democracy is not a finished product, not something that we have, but something of which we must see ourselves as a necessarily active part. Which is why the man is spending his day and late into the night volunteering at one of the voting centers. I sent him off with a big box of oatmeal cookies I baked late last night.

Other than that, I have finally managed to sand down the bit of the wooden floor by the patio door that badly needs revarnishing. I tried my best, my arms are shaking from the rattle of the sander but in some places, the worn out bits are too damaged and I should probably get a better tool or someone with more ellbow grease. Do I care? Not at all. 

The song for today. For more about its history, click here. In the last couple of weeks, the varied gangs of street musicians in our city have come together and wherever/whenever the neonazis put up their election campaign stands, they turned up to sing this song. I have no video from them, this one is from a somewhere in Italy.

Human dignity shall be inviolable

Well, we did have a good bit of rain, as in: WTF, this is meant to be summer. But at least no flooding (yet) as is happening in other parts of this country. The garden of course loves it, although the tomatoes could do with sunlight. Which may just be around the corner, and probably too much of it.

We dug up the first lot of potatoes, the French pink ones, Franceline, that's their name.

In between showers, I have attended a Fridays for Future rally, participated in last week's critical mass cycle event and sat in a couple of meetings and talks celebrating 75 years of the German constitution. I was ten years old when we started to read and discuss it in school, one article a day, starting with the first one: Human dignity shall be inviolable. So like the good citizen I am, I have started again, one article a day, for 146 days.

It's been a difficult week or three with this diet stuff and not everything works as suggested. I cherish the days when I am not bent over with bloating for most of the afternoon. The word surgery is floating on the horizon, second opinion appointment in two weeks. I am exhausted.

As for distraction and enlightenment, this is what I have come across:

This article as an example of what could be more unhinged, crazy and yes, they do think that Elon Musk is the future king. Pronatalists, seriously?

And for the week that was, two images:

Martin Rowson in the Guardian

 

As for memes, this keeps on coming up: 

climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it 

 

Finally, a poem.

Questionnaire


1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

2. For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

3. What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy.

4. In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill. 

Wendell Berry

the feeling

the rambling rose

It's been wet, so much rain, and the garden is exploding. This year, the three plum trees are so full - even after dropping some unripe fruit - it looks suspicious, as if the trees are giving it their final all.

the veg bed in mid May

There have been days when I felt I was losing the plot and on these days, I go through the motions with teeth clenched (not literally) and the thought that no, I am not going to stop doing what I want to do regardless of colicky pains and all the rest of it. I walk into the library, pick up my ordered books, move on to the whole food shop, sit down with a coffee, smile at everybody thinking, nobody knows. Surely, I must look healthy.

the tomatoes are meh this year

 

On the way home, checking the front gardens and greeting the cats, the feeling of dread surfaces. The dread has nothing to do with my health, it's much deeper, bigger. It has taken me some time to recognise that it has become a constant feeling, low down, watchful. It is a bit like the feeling you get when you are awake in bed, waiting for the sound of your teenage daughter's key in the door after the night bus has passed the stop down at the corner. Only bigger. Because, your daughter has grown up and can look after herself. In hindsight, it was such a tiny feeling of dread, for such a brief period. And what a relief to know it's over. Nothing compared to this big dread. Bigger even than the fear of war, of the madman in Russia. Of the fascists gaining ground in Europe again. Of the bird flu virus spreading to humans. Fiddlesticks.

And I look at the people I pass on my walks, greet and smile at, watch them in their gardens, on their patios, playing with their kids and grandchildren, walking their dogs, the two guys who empty our bins, the postman on his e-bike, the mad woman across the street as she carefully covers her front steps with old crockery to ward off evil spirits, the toddler next door to her learning to walk, the twin girls across our garden playing Elsa and Anna. And I wonder if any of them, all of them, feel it too, maybe not right now but some day to come, the feeling of dread for our planet's future. The dread we keep on pushing away. And I wonder what would happen if we could share it and make it go away.

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship, or family, or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.

James Baldwin 

 

the pillows are in place

in which I brag about myself

Effort has never been my forte. In school, I was lazy. I did the bare minimum and basically sailed through it with equal portions of luck, bullshitting and because at age 10 I was deemed to be clever. For example, based on a lengthy story I wrote as a homework assignment, it was decided that eventually, I would be writer. Also, a small enamel pendant I had hastily manufactured in art class was proof that I was a budding jewellery designer. And when I correctly used an oversized protractor on the blackboard in my first week of geometry, I was considered a budding maths nerd. Whatever I did, it was enough to be placed one year ahead of my peers. That was my stroke of luck as it happened at that brief period before teenage arrogance when I was still amazed by what school and learning and the teachers had to offer. Soon enough, I found school confusing, there was much that was over my head and which could only be tackled if I invested time and effort, something that soon interfered with my other interests (I forget what they were) and in response, I decided that school was mostly boring. But whatever I did, I was still supposedly clever and so I sailed through school on the strength of that. It did not matter that I knew deep down that I wasn't clever at all. It was enough to just act as if. In hindsight, it was my first brush with politics because once you were deemed to be a clever kid, the teachers could hardly go back on their judgement, couldn't they and so I was carried along year after year, collecting dreadful results mostly, performing poorly in most subjects apart from German and Latin. I won't deny that there were times when indeed I was clever and that maybe I could have been clever all those years but basically, I couldn't be arsed to do a thing and I had figured out early enough that my shortfalls in science and maths could be nicely covered by my moderate skills in essay writing and showing off my love for reading. Plus learning Latin verbs and regurgitating translations of Tacitus and Cicero was simply down to working out the appropriate techniques and applying the stuff when required.
Modern languages were my worst subject. I failed three attempts of voluntary French and I barely made it to the end of the compulsory years of English, despite a lengthy and very boring time as an exchange student in Grimsby, one of the duller places on earth in what was then south Lincolnshire. What got me through English without complete failure was the American Forces Network radio. When I finally was allowed to drop English after year 10, I was looking forward to a life without ever having to bother myself with it again.

This morning, on the radio, I listened to a person interviewing a world famous writer. A long time ago, I knew this person - the interviewer, not the world famous writer - quite well, we were part of a crowd, young people who wanted to change the world the way you do when you are young. This set me off on one of the internet tunnel searches for the others who were part of the crowd. The ones I found, of course, are those who for reasons of their accomplishments, skills, and obvious cleverness have made their way, won awards, published poetry, lead important campaigns and so on. In all this pleasant discovery, these are good people and I am amazed that long ago, we shared a path, I felt humble. Me and my failed degrees, my zig zag course of a career, my meagre pension, my ill health, I could go on. But then R pointed out that if, for example and simply to brag about myself, I was to put my name into the Google Scholar search bar, there will be over one hundred results. That includes many double mentions and all of it is someone else's original work just edited and/or translated by me, but for a brief moment, I felt that yes, I have achieved stuff. I know my stuff, I work with language and while I was never on radio interviewing a Nobel laureate, I have left a mark, a small hidden one.

Sometimes, I regret not putting in the effort, I regret dropping too many subjects much too soon because they were not instantly appealing and obviously required time and mental struggle. I see this girl and this woman who was out looking for the short cut, the sweet and easy, the fun side of things first of all. Of this I am certain and I admit as much. Of course, life caught up with me, motherhood caught up with me, finances and lack thereof caught up with me. I managed, my life has been good, and yet I know that in terms of what people at the time - and they were no fools, they did see potential - predicted and expected, I failed to deliver. Too late. Although I just enrolled in an online course on human physiology of all things.

 

Good Bones

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

Maggie Smith