Slender plumes of soldiers

Cardinal flowers are in bloom in the native-plants section of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Thoreau wrote about this flower a number of times in the Journal. Like the autumn leaves of the sumac, the fiery blossoms roused military associations in his mind. (The photo is from the US Forest Service, as my own turned out blurry.)

August 27, 1856
The cardinals in the ditch make a splendid show now, though they would have been much fresher and finer a week ago. They nearly fill the ditch for thirty-five rods perfectly straight, about three feet high. I count at random ten in one square foot, and as they are two feet wide by thirty-five rods, there are four or five thousand at least, and maybe more. They look like slender plumes of soldiers advancing in a dense troop, and a few white (or rather pale-pink) ones are mingled with the scarlet. That is the most splendid show of cardinal-flowers I ever saw.

In the late 1970s, the naturalists Ann Zwinger and Edwin Way Teale took a series of canoe trips down the Assabet and Sudbury Rivers, the two streams that join to create the Concord River at Egg Rock in Thoreau’s hometown. They noted that the polygala Thoreau once found in a local peat bog was now rare, and that the pretty but aggressive purple loosestrife, a European import, had largely displaced the bright reds of the cardinal flower.

Yet it may be that there are natural fluctuations in the numbers of the cardinal flower.

August 16, 1858
I am surprised to find that where of late years there have been so many cardinal-flowers, there are now very few. So much does a plant fluctuate from season to season. Here I found nearly white ones once. Channing tells me that he saw a white bobolink in a large flock of them to-day. Almost all flowers and animals may be found white. As in a large number of cardinal-flowers you may find a white one, so in a large flock of bobolinks, also, it seems, you may find a white one.

The Felix Unger of cats

Our cat Dudley is a rescue cat. He spent the first several months of his life struggling to survive on the streets of New York, and when his mother and siblings were rescued, he was the last of his litter to be adopted. (Hard to understand, because he’s a charming little guy.)

Perhaps as a result, Dudley has a strong need to control his environment. He has firm beliefs about the proper time to be fed, and when I come home from work he is sure to remind Jenn so she can greet me at the door.

Early in his stay with us, he set up what we refer to as his apartment, between the wall and the head of the bed. There he can retreat, sheltered by a pillow, when he needs some personal space. To furnish the place, he borrowed some items, including my watch, some pens, and Jenn’s MP3 player. Extra pens he would stow under the rug in the living room, neatly lined up.

Now that he’s more comfortable, Dudley has become less of a kleptomaniac. But his controlling tendencies are still obvious from the way he handles his toys. In the corner of the bedroom behind the footlockers, just behind his perch, Dudley has arranged three of his balls in perfect alignment and in order of size.

Silver pillars on the bridges

Okay, I’ll bite. What are these things? I first saw them being installed at the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge. One of them rose smoothly and silently from a tube in the pavement, then stared with the beady little red eyes set around its upper rim.

More recently, I saw more of them at the Manhattan end of the Manhattan Bridge, including this one—already decorated.

Are they to prevent terrorists in motorized vehicles from accessing the bridges? Do the little red eyes count the number of people who pass them? Do they detect radiation? I am puzzled. 

O nobly born

As the weather gets warmer, the weary blogger spends less time reflecting on serious books and more time just snapping pictures and saying, “How about that?”

This flyer was posted near the pedestrian entrance at the Brooklyn end of the Manhattan Bridge. The sketch of the jaded skateboard dude receiving the spark of life from the Almighty is signed SPUTZY. The quotation is from the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Seeing the tags dangling from the flyer, I thought, “Oh, this is just a clever promotion for some product or service.” But no: Each tag simply says, “Remember the unity of all living things.” Hard to argue with that. 

Open City by Teju Cole

There’s a lot to say about Teju Cole’s absorbing, maddening, largely plotless novel Open City. Its protagonist Julius, a Nigerian-German medical student with a specialty in psychiatry, is touchy, moody, and self-absorbed, yet sometimes capable of tender concern, as in his meetings with a former professor who is now dying. 

As well-informed and opinionated in art, history, and classical music as he is in medicine, he can be unbelievably pretentious. Watching a group of Chinese dancers and musicians in a park, “I thought of Li Po and Wang Wei, of Harry Partch’s pitch-bending songs, and of Judith Weir’s opera The Consolations of Scholarship, which were the things I could best connect to this Chinese music.” Yet, noticing that many of the dancers wore red or pink, “I could not remember if red was lucky in Chinese culture.”

Among the many oddly detailed digressions in the novel are several pages about bedbugs, and a discussion—which actually concludes the book—of the numbers of birds that have died by flying into the Statue of Liberty. The very last sentence, in fact, tells us that 175 wrens were killed on the night of October 13, 1888.

As more than one reviewer has noted, Teju Cole’s book is reminiscent of W.G. Sebald in the way it dispenses with conventional plot and apparently treads the boundaries of fiction and autobiography. (Cole’s first novel Every Day is for the Thief, so far published only in Nigeria, includes black and white photos, as Sebald does in books like The Rings of Saturn.)

What holds the book together is the brooding, fussy, melancholy voice of its know-it-all narrator. (As if in reaction to his show of erudition, a reader of my library copy of Open City inked out the “m” in “whom” in the first line of page 154, where it is used incorrectly.)

The author’s nerve is impressive, as in a passage on page 146 that echoes the famous conclusion of the James Joyce story “The Dead.” A couple of pages later, a descent by plane into New York reminds Julius of the scale model of the city in the Queens Museum of Art.

I was saddled with strange mental transpositions: that the plane was a coffin, that the city below was a vast graveyard with white marble and stone blocks of various heights and sizes. But as we broke through the last layer of clouds and the city in its true form suddenly appeared a thousand feet below us, the impression I had was not at all morbid. What I experienced was the unsettling feeling that I had had precisely this view of the city before, accompanied by the equally strong feeling that it had not been from the point of view of a plane.

Then it came to me: I was remembering something I had seen about a year earlier: the sprawling scale model of the city that was kept at the Queens Museum of Art. The model had been built for the World’s Fair in 1964, at great cost, and afterward had been periodically updated to keep up with the changing topography and built environment of the city. It showed, in impressive detail, with almost a million tiny buildings, and with bridges, parks, rivers, and architectural landmarks, the true form of the city. The attention to detail was so meticulous that one could not help but think of Borges’s cartographers, who, obsessed with accuracy, had made a map so large and so finely detailed that it matched the empire’s scale on a ratio of one to one, a map in which each thing coincided with its spot on the map. The map proved so unwieldy that it was eventually folded up and left to rot in the desert....

On the day I had seen the Panorama, I had been impressed by the many fine details it presented: the rivulets of roads snaking across a velvety Central Park, the boomerang of the Bronx curving up to the north, the elegant beige spire of the Empire State Building, the white tablets of the Brooklyn piers, and the pair of gray blocks on the southern tip of Manhattan, each about a foot high, representing the persistence, in the model, of the World Trade Center towers, which, in reality, had already been destroyed.