Why so green and lonely?
2006-09-11 00:27Today, I woke up in New Haven, had lunch in Portland, and I'm sleeping tonight in Boston. So I missed a few states in New England; this has been a really good day.
Yesterday was relatively sedentary, but I spent Friday in New York City with Mike—otherwise known as the dear friend who doesn't own a livejournal—because we'd had plans for a museum trip on for months, and this was more or less the first time all summer we'd been in the same tri-state area at the same time. So I caught a Metro-North at a painfully early hour of the morning, and he picked me up at Grand Central, and we arrived the American Museum of Natural History in time for lunch. For about an hour or so we wandered, mostly through the solar system and the deep sea, but the highlight was a temporary exhibit of live lizards and snakes. He liked best the Henkel's Leaf-Tailed Gecko with its immense, moonlike eyes and its lichenous skin, glued tenaciously to plate glass with its pale toe-pads, but I loved the Green Tree Monitor—a nimble, slim-bodied, whip-tailed creature, almost turquoise in color and bead-brindled in black, that looked exactly like a wingless baby dragon. And more than three years after he moved to New York, we finally walked together through Central Park. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we visited the permanent collection of musical instruments for Mike and for me an exhibition of Mayan royal artifacts. I remember in particular a funerary mask: green jade in fitted tessellations, white wisps of shell like tusks at the corners of its mouth for the escaping soul. But what amazed me was a mirror pieced together from jigsaw slices of polished hematite like darkened, stone-broken water—to look into it gave back your reflection in shadowy fragments, eyes multiplied over and over, all the rest in fractures. It was used for divination into the underworld. I thought, afterward, of Tezcatlipoca. These were good images to take back on the train to New Haven.
As for today's travels, if you will remember from last month's trip to Maine:
I fell in love with the sea-green glass onion bottle in the front window: salvaged from a late seventeenth-century wreck in the Caribbean, and so swirled and crusted with old sand and bits of barnacle inside that it looked prismatic, iridescent, streaked like a wave breaking and cracked; full of dreams. It wasn't for sale, but the proprietor did consider selling it to me, until it turned out that the bottle couldn't be gotten out of the windowfront display—like a wreckage of the past; about the only thing I didn't see in there was a Jenny Haniver—without taking the whole thing apart. Alas. Whenever we go back to Portland, I'll visit it. I think some of my dreams are in there.
Only I heard back from the proprietors of the China Sea Marine Trading Company a few days ago, and they had in fact decided to sell it to me. And Mike had decided, as soon as he heard me rhapsodize about the bottle, that he would get it for me as a birthday present. So he stayed over last night and we hauled ourselves out of bed at an only slightly less insane hour and we drove up to Portland and there it was: I still don't know how they got it out of the window. The proprietor knocked off half the price and threw in a stray CD of Gordon Bok's Clear Away in the Morning to be paid for if it played, what the hell if it didn't. I hope I thanked him profusely enough, because I don't know that anyone has ever made me a gift like that. Mike tried to hold a conversation with his sixty-year-old greenwing macaw Singapore, who seemed to have a taste for Mexican corn salsa; we talked about music. And I took my sea-glass bottle home, wrapped in plastic and newspaper and a J.C. Penney bag the color of a strawberry milkshake, and Mike says I didn't stop smiling until New Hampshire. And it was wonderful to see him, never mind the birthday gift: which I always will mind, in the best way. If there was a drawback to the day, it was that we couldn't stay in Maine. If that's the worst . . .
So. The bottle dates from the last quarter of the 1600's and comes from the mouth of a river somewhere in the Caribbean, where there were rum-runners and pirates.* Maybe someone sitting on a dock pitched it into the water when he'd finished drinking, more likely it's from a shipment that wound up tragically at the bottom of the harbor rather than in decent people's bloodstreams; my brother claims it looks like Bootstrap Bill last drank rum out of it. Three hundred years in sand and currents, silted up with salt. Now it sits on my windowsill and still looks like it's half-full of ocean. I took photographs, but almost all of them came out incurably blurred; I've posted the survivors below. Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kraada for hosting the images, because he is awesome that way.
(If this were a dream, there'd be rum.)
( Read more... )
". . . It's not antique, is it?"
"Probably. It's been floating around in the ocean for a hundred years, waiting for someone to find it and break into it. Now it's more valuable than what's inside." She watched him patiently. "Can I see?"
"Castles," he murmured, watching the shifting lights. "Luminous fish. Reflections. Dreams. Rhinestones from Woolworth's." He yielded the bottle finally. She held it to the light a moment or two, motionless, not breathing. Then, abruptly, she dropped it into the sink and tapped it once, twice, with the marble rolling pin.
"Be careful," he breathed. The glass shattered on the third tap.
They gazed at the pieces. Megan stirred them with her finger. Jonah picked up a shard, held it to the light. She watched him. He shook his head finally. "Nothing." He drew a long breath, looked at her. "But there was something."
—Patricia McKillip, Something Rich and Strange (1994)
*Who were, from the way the proprietor told it, the same people. Maybe when the looting and plundering business was slow, bootlegging was the next best thing . . . ? The Wikipedia entry on piracy has, incidentally, made my day: "Dutch pirates were known as kapers, zeerovers or vrijbuiters ('pirates'), the latter combining the words vrij meaning free, buiter meaning looter. The word vrijbuiter was loaned into English as freebooter and into French as flibustier. The French loan-word returned to English in the form of filibusters, adventurers who became involved in Latin American revolutions and coups. It finally came to mean the disruptive parliamentary maneuver of talking nonstop." I love language.
Yesterday was relatively sedentary, but I spent Friday in New York City with Mike—otherwise known as the dear friend who doesn't own a livejournal—because we'd had plans for a museum trip on for months, and this was more or less the first time all summer we'd been in the same tri-state area at the same time. So I caught a Metro-North at a painfully early hour of the morning, and he picked me up at Grand Central, and we arrived the American Museum of Natural History in time for lunch. For about an hour or so we wandered, mostly through the solar system and the deep sea, but the highlight was a temporary exhibit of live lizards and snakes. He liked best the Henkel's Leaf-Tailed Gecko with its immense, moonlike eyes and its lichenous skin, glued tenaciously to plate glass with its pale toe-pads, but I loved the Green Tree Monitor—a nimble, slim-bodied, whip-tailed creature, almost turquoise in color and bead-brindled in black, that looked exactly like a wingless baby dragon. And more than three years after he moved to New York, we finally walked together through Central Park. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we visited the permanent collection of musical instruments for Mike and for me an exhibition of Mayan royal artifacts. I remember in particular a funerary mask: green jade in fitted tessellations, white wisps of shell like tusks at the corners of its mouth for the escaping soul. But what amazed me was a mirror pieced together from jigsaw slices of polished hematite like darkened, stone-broken water—to look into it gave back your reflection in shadowy fragments, eyes multiplied over and over, all the rest in fractures. It was used for divination into the underworld. I thought, afterward, of Tezcatlipoca. These were good images to take back on the train to New Haven.
As for today's travels, if you will remember from last month's trip to Maine:
I fell in love with the sea-green glass onion bottle in the front window: salvaged from a late seventeenth-century wreck in the Caribbean, and so swirled and crusted with old sand and bits of barnacle inside that it looked prismatic, iridescent, streaked like a wave breaking and cracked; full of dreams. It wasn't for sale, but the proprietor did consider selling it to me, until it turned out that the bottle couldn't be gotten out of the windowfront display—like a wreckage of the past; about the only thing I didn't see in there was a Jenny Haniver—without taking the whole thing apart. Alas. Whenever we go back to Portland, I'll visit it. I think some of my dreams are in there.
Only I heard back from the proprietors of the China Sea Marine Trading Company a few days ago, and they had in fact decided to sell it to me. And Mike had decided, as soon as he heard me rhapsodize about the bottle, that he would get it for me as a birthday present. So he stayed over last night and we hauled ourselves out of bed at an only slightly less insane hour and we drove up to Portland and there it was: I still don't know how they got it out of the window. The proprietor knocked off half the price and threw in a stray CD of Gordon Bok's Clear Away in the Morning to be paid for if it played, what the hell if it didn't. I hope I thanked him profusely enough, because I don't know that anyone has ever made me a gift like that. Mike tried to hold a conversation with his sixty-year-old greenwing macaw Singapore, who seemed to have a taste for Mexican corn salsa; we talked about music. And I took my sea-glass bottle home, wrapped in plastic and newspaper and a J.C. Penney bag the color of a strawberry milkshake, and Mike says I didn't stop smiling until New Hampshire. And it was wonderful to see him, never mind the birthday gift: which I always will mind, in the best way. If there was a drawback to the day, it was that we couldn't stay in Maine. If that's the worst . . .
So. The bottle dates from the last quarter of the 1600's and comes from the mouth of a river somewhere in the Caribbean, where there were rum-runners and pirates.* Maybe someone sitting on a dock pitched it into the water when he'd finished drinking, more likely it's from a shipment that wound up tragically at the bottom of the harbor rather than in decent people's bloodstreams; my brother claims it looks like Bootstrap Bill last drank rum out of it. Three hundred years in sand and currents, silted up with salt. Now it sits on my windowsill and still looks like it's half-full of ocean. I took photographs, but almost all of them came out incurably blurred; I've posted the survivors below. Thanks to
kraada for hosting the images, because he is awesome that way.(If this were a dream, there'd be rum.)
( Read more... )
". . . It's not antique, is it?"
"Probably. It's been floating around in the ocean for a hundred years, waiting for someone to find it and break into it. Now it's more valuable than what's inside." She watched him patiently. "Can I see?"
"Castles," he murmured, watching the shifting lights. "Luminous fish. Reflections. Dreams. Rhinestones from Woolworth's." He yielded the bottle finally. She held it to the light a moment or two, motionless, not breathing. Then, abruptly, she dropped it into the sink and tapped it once, twice, with the marble rolling pin.
"Be careful," he breathed. The glass shattered on the third tap.
They gazed at the pieces. Megan stirred them with her finger. Jonah picked up a shard, held it to the light. She watched him. He shook his head finally. "Nothing." He drew a long breath, looked at her. "But there was something."
—Patricia McKillip, Something Rich and Strange (1994)
*Who were, from the way the proprietor told it, the same people. Maybe when the looting and plundering business was slow, bootlegging was the next best thing . . . ? The Wikipedia entry on piracy has, incidentally, made my day: "Dutch pirates were known as kapers, zeerovers or vrijbuiters ('pirates'), the latter combining the words vrij meaning free, buiter meaning looter. The word vrijbuiter was loaned into English as freebooter and into French as flibustier. The French loan-word returned to English in the form of filibusters, adventurers who became involved in Latin American revolutions and coups. It finally came to mean the disruptive parliamentary maneuver of talking nonstop." I love language.
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