MORAVIAN GARDEN / DISCURSUS II

I took the soil the moles offered, below the new stone steps and low wall, and spread it over the cut (salvaged), newly-installed sod at the top of the wall / steps, dusting it with sand, spreading a thin layer of quick-lime, and grass seed … Thor rolled in, rumbling, and the short outburst lasted just long enough to wash the seed into place amid the blades of grass and trefoil leaves of white clover … “I heard, at the bottom of the garden, the last peals of thunder growling among the lilacs …” … (05/11/04) …

24 hours after Thor passed through the stream turned brown from silt washed down from (presumably) the uplands where trees are cut on the steep slopes of the valley (somewhat indiscriminately these days) … I noted a small bird carrying a single strand of hair in its beak … The swallows were dancing in the evening sky … The rockery has expanded, and the fading clumps of Armeria maritima were moved to this new portion of the garden from the Kepler Ellipse (where they were languishing beneath the lush foliage of herbaceous perennials) …

Armeria, echoes of Iona (pour mon moi) … The Western Isles (of Scotland) … fragments of an Archie Fisher song go round in my head, “I came to a western island; / As far as a man can walk is my land. / I cleared ten acres and a house I built / Into the side of the hill.” … “The roof leaks, the windows rattle, / And the grass in the high ground won’t feed cattle; / The west wind blowin’ off the sea / Makes it hard to grow a tree …” … “Some nights, when the bright lights flicker, / I sail to the mainland for my liquor. / Haven’t got a woman to call my own, / But I never wake up alone …” … “A man needs to feel the ground / And the wind to tell him that the world spins ‘round; / To watch the stars and taste the sea, / And a woman to keep him free …” … (Eildon Music, 1976) …

Strange gnats hover in the air … Flies swirl, spiraling in midair, aloft on miniature thermals … Yet a fly is not an eagle nor hawk … In the garden, early blooms … Magnolia, Primula, Myosotis, Bergenia (just passed), Aquilegia, Pheasant’s-Eye Narcissus (Poet’s Narcissus), Doronicum, Clematis alpina (starting its seasonal climb toward the stars) … Newly-planted Nepeta, Lilacs, Peonies (in bud), splashes of color in freshly planted pots (here and there) … Helleborus (hanging on, not yet ideally situated) … Lascivious green fronds of ferns (delicate, upright … others with inward-turned tips, waiting awhile longer to reach outwards, switching from vertical to horizontal deployment …) … A few days later, frost nips the tips of the ferns … Cold nights and sometimes sleet in the early morning …

Cinnamon-streaked crosiers, Pulmonaria (lungwort), Dicentra … Ribes (currant bushes, standard form, single-stemmed) crowded into the corner of the shrinking vegetable plot at the far north-western edge of the garden … First flush of Iberis … (05/14/04) …

Skryje is a village with perhaps twenty to thirty small houses, many summer houses (dachas) … Because it is in a valley, the road more or less ends here, with impassable passes through the wooded hills of north-west Moravia …

The country house is almost a compound, with additions over time spread over the perhaps one-half hectare site … In the front portion, along the road, an enterprising soul has rented one small room for an impromptu weekend pub … for 1000 KC per year (about $40 US …) … It operates off the map (radar), for the most part, as does the village itself …

S and I go for evening beer (Cerna Hora, Black Mountain) … 11 KC for a large glass … Everyone else is working on a tab … The blue cash-box is mostly idle, whereas the notebook full of tallies (strokes) is annotated every few minutes … A car arrives with new half kegs … and two bags of chips (which are passed around, gratis …) …

Ten to twelve locals are downing beer after beer, a small stove ticking away, burning pine, warming the room … A pair of shoes, an umbrella, a picture of Havel and Husak (Havel’s enemy, his bête noire) adorn the four walls … They silently ignore one another … Three dogs wander about or nap on chairs … A black poodle, a white spaniel, and a mongrel dachshund (brown with a striking white diamond on the back of its elongated neck …) …

It’s all Czech, this evening … I don’t understand much at all … I do detect a furious debate about the US as the new Russia (viz., Soviet Union) … a new imperial cancer and/or pox … The former fearless Czech communist leader Husak is frowning … Havel is smiling … They stare past one another, gazes crossing in mid-air, overseeing, refereeing this debate … Their pictures bracket the non-sense of the current neo-imperial nightmares, here and not-here (in one form or another …) …

The woman with the black fingernails and orange hair is passing beer after beer down the table while wildly carrying the debate … To her left is a barrel-chested man with wisps of hair tucked beneath his cloth, visor-less cap … His pale-blue trousers are patched with a dark-blue cloth … threadbare … Another man, sitting next to the cat-napping dachshund, gazes blankly off into space, occasionally returning to make a point … A three-light chandelier-type light fixture with two lights (bulbs) illuminates a scene straight out of a Daumier print … This pub, always-already below the salt, somehow measures time (and life / humanity) for this handful of quibbling souls …

Sad-eyed, 35-year-old M (her Slovak husband in jail for some sort of blue-collar, economic crime) reaches over the makeshift bar to draw beer from the tap … In-between fetching beers she devours an entire bag of chips … The saliva from the white spaniel has dried just above my knee on my recently hand-washed black jeans … The brown dachshund (with the white diamond on the back of its neck), curled up on the chair next to the man staring off into space, holds one ear aloft, cocked (the other flopped downwards), listening … Occasionally s/he opens one eye to measure the crowd (to see if his/her master/mistress has left, perhaps … who knows ??? …) …

A frost is expected tonight … the stars appear far-away and dim … The air, chilled, is damp and sweet with wood-smoke … Night, and its very own velvet revolution, has fallen … (05/14/04) …

The ailing, ancient lilacs … Syringa vulgaris (Common Lilac) … They are late this year and the old stems are covered with peeling bark and lichen … I pruned away the dead wood, climbing into the multi-stemmed base, poised, snipping and sawing … I set aside the cuttings for a lilac fire … With a wire brush, I scrubbed away the old bark and lichen revealing a tawny, golden under-hue … They lean out over the second grass ellipse / oval, newly-trimmed, over a low stone sitting wall constructed a few years ago … I mixed wood ash and nettle water in a bucket with more water and brushed this slurry onto the stems from the base to the newer, somewhat greener wood in the crown … These lilacs are in some way S’s mother’s double … They have been here since the beginning … She is fond of them and worries about them as she worries about her own failing health … Her ailments and those of the lilac tree are the same … Time has taken its toll … Perhaps she could sense the treatment - the ‘manicure’, the exfoliation (scrubbing), and ash-mud application (masque) - miles away in Brno … (05/15/04)

H. brought a large tome on Santini’s bizarre, sacred 18th-century, high-Baroque architecture, publishhed (lavishly) by Charles University (Praha) in 1998 … text in Czech … Czech high-Baroque syntheses based on Italian-Baroque influences (including innumerable outrageous buildings constructed by Italian architects working in the Habsburg Czech Lands for the Church after the brutally squelched insurrections of the Protestant nobility …) … An architectural influenza … The pictures are not in Czech, but an odd, ideal (universal) language of forms … Baroque-Gothic forms … spatial and decorative (the decorative quite often feigning authenticity … painterly effects … painted plaster made to look like marble or stone … Angels perched / roosting about the typically billowing spaces of baroque interiors …) … ‘Italianate’ excursions, constructed on the run, in haste, in a period of perhaps fifty to seventy years, many after-Santini (after his death), and only ‘based’ on his plans … Yet rooted in the northern soil of the nominally ‘Catholic’ Czech Lands … Between 1700 and 1750, for the most part, dozens of churches, chapels, and monastic compounds went up, Santini turning out plans from the sacred lathe of his imagination, a production (mostly in brick) much denigrated, later, by the arch-ideologues of Modernism (the enemies of ‘historicism’) … His workshop no doubt was aligned with the obscure sources of pure ideality buried within the Counter-Reformation assault (well after the Thirty Years War), when built propaganda was produced en masse like the annual crops of wheat and barley … Fervid, fermented geometries after Borromini and Brandl … Interiors after Bernini (literally), in Praha and northwest Moravia (in particular), Zd’ar somehow the epicenter of the most abstruse, fabulous (troubling) works … (05/16/04) …

The botched pruning of the plum tree was resolved by sawing off all the stumps near-flush with the trunk (leaving a small nub to allow the wound to ‘heal’, produce -- in time -- ‘closure’ …) … This state of things came about when two Hornbeam (Carpinus) trees were added to each side of the old tree, as understudies, in preparation for eventual removal of the senescent plum … 

Venturing further into the canopy, I sawed away at extraneous branches of the plum, those competing with one another (overlapping), and any dead wood and/or shoots rising vertically from within the inner part of the crown … The wind was gusting and I rode out the swaying tree from within the forked upper reaches of the pliant tree … Eyes from passersby and inquisitive townspeople followed these antics … The ladder reached only so far, to the first tier of mature branches leaving the column of the trunk, and I stepped into the architecture of the canopy, testing each limb in advance, leaving behind the solid (immoveable) structure of the ladder and lower tree for the upper, mobile (waving) infrastructure of the perhaps thirty-foot tall plum … I removed all competing branches, save one (which would have left a huge hole in the canopy), throwing the cut branches (afterwards) over the garden wall onto the tops of the chicken-wire-covered compost frames, collecting small twigs and branches in a basket for a small fire, adding them to the lilac cuttings for a future ‘ceremonial’ fire by the streamside (always at twilight … even-ing …) …

Notes from the Tisnov nursery … Chamaecyparis lawsoniana ‘White Spot’ … Buxus sempervirens (558 KC to 748 KC … KC = Czech koruna …$1 US = 25 KC …) … Buddleya weyeriana, B. davidii, B. alternifolia … Euonymous europaeus (‘Spindle-tree’ … the same one we see often growing in the thickets, spread by seed by birds … 198 KC …) … Hydrangea anomala ‘Cordifolia’ (the same as H. anomala petiolaris ??? …) … Confirming plants already planted … and sizing up alternatives … Which Buddleya did S plant ??? … The little Buxus s. plants we put in years ago are now worth (at retail) $20 to $30 US … Looking for Azaleas to grow in pots … Rhododendron ‘Persil’ (white … 568 KC), R. ‘Kermesiana’ (pink … 218 KC), R. ‘Geisha Orange’ (85 KC) … perhaps … (05/17/04) …

Time out, Brno … Went to see the Josef Capek exhibition, “Josef Capek: The Humblest Art” (works from 1914-1924), at Moravska Galerie … “Modern artistic sentiment delights in expressing itself in the most comprehensive manner through the maximum economy.” (JC, 1924) … Karel’s brother … It was Josef who coined, for Karel, the word ‘robot’ … Here are Josef’s expressive, eclectic paintings from the 1910s and early 1920s … Heads, torsos, half-length figures of women c.1914 greet you as you enter the first gallery (watercolor on paper, plus ink and collage, ink and charcoal variations) … Enigmatic expressions … one eye, an ‘x’ for a mouth, sidewise sweep of hair (“Head of a Young Woman with Ribbon”, 1914) … ‘Meditative calm’, and lyrical half-abstractions … “Fractions of an almost agonizing sharpness emerged […] Soothing womanly line, man’s dark torso and a wholly imperceptible face […] Just before they vanished from sight, the images sharpened with an air of tranquility and empathy, as if a flow of water stopped […]” (JC, “Manuscript Found on the Street”, 1915) … “Geometric signs: and fragment[s] of reality introduced through a concrete detail [vestige] …” (Wall text, with interpellations, “Assembling the Figure”) … “La Toilette” (series, c.1916-1917, linocut on paper), recurring (wan / thin) smile, angular elbows, jutting breasts, tilted head, ‘high’ stylized banalities (lyrical reductions) … all of these works are small, intimate anti-portraits … “Street Walker” (oil on canvas, perhaps 24” x 24”, 1918), blue-violet aura, diagonal bird-like prostitute/silhouette, black forms against the vague illumination of a streetlamp / orb … “Angles, light and letters” après Picasso and Leger (legerdemain) … and Braque … animistic rites folded into urban bric-a-brac … ‘Disclaimed versions’ c.1918, or small paintings torn into six pieces and reassembled here and now … jig-saw puzzles … “Primitivism and magic realism” (Wall text) … Capek’s The Humblest Art (Aventinum, 1920) returns “to harmony and idyll”, or “melancholy that springs from an unfulfilled longing for a lost paradise” (Wall text) … a la Henri Rousseau … “sanctity of everyday life” … or “glancing at a Singer sewing machine” which “falsifies nothing in this world” … Tired, then, of the phantasmatic and sinister world of late-Expressionism (lingering on in/through Cubism) … Moravska Galerie v Brne, 26/03/04 through 23/05/04 … (05/18/04) …

Watering … I make singular, repeated trips to the river with watering can in hand to bring the greenish-brown water up the fifty feet or so to the garden … up one set of stairs, remembering to duck, to not bang my head on the low limb of the prune tree guarding the entrance to the garden from below … Perhaps if I was putting out a fire I would carry two buckets at once, and hasten less slowly … Each bucket is delivered to the beds in a coarse fountain  / spray of drops and streams through the metal rose at the end of the watering can’s sleek, galvanized steel neck / spout … It is, then, an aesthetic thing not to be maximized (nor underestimated), nor Taylorized (though during droughts it is less likely to please in quite the same nonchalant manner …) … As the artificial rain-shower travels over the terrain of the beds, washing away bits of mulch and sand, settling things, the last drops are deliberately (carefully) allowed to fall, slowly, in their minute particularity, upon a sprig of violet, a single rosette of sedum hiding between two stones, a clod of dirt, a crease of stone, a whorl of fern … till the can is spent … totally, and completely … (05/20/04) …

A sinuous, curving line derived from the upright body of the wayfaring ‘cosmic’ ducks (which wander up and down the stream each evening), previously installed in the early ground plan of the garden (but later obscured by subsequent work), has returned, today, in the form of a freshly cut edge in the lowest terrace (above the lower garden wall), tracing (yet departing as well) the curvature of the stacked small, flat-stone edge that marks the lower, second-to-last bed … Below this new line (drawn with spade and sand), a last strip of grass / lawn (swirling) leads toward the new rockery … Below this last strip of grass, the Hemlock (Tsuga) bed (young trees spaced one-spade length apart, one day to ‘close’, forming a low, loose hedge) … Beyond that, the Woodbine (grown from seed purloined in a waste-place in Brno years ago) trails / spills over the wall, dropping / falling half of the five feet or so to the compost frames below, outside the garden itself …

‘Walk the mystery of the curve …’ … As with the care of soil, one does not water plants, per se, but beds (and rock edges and steps …) … the garden milieu (milieux), its mise-en-scene is what is most supportive (important) within this theater of affects (never effects, nor causes and effects) … As the secret ‘total work of art’, a garden is a multiplicity of ‘folded’ and nominal effects (superabundant, saturated -- hopefully -- as an affective milieu …) … The fertility of the soil is mirrored overhead, at night, within the starry vault, with/by analogues that suggest intense carnality within all things … luminosity … and most of all, within imagination (the ‘soil’ from which a garden lives …) … I detect in Dante’s placing Beatrice’s eyes in the starry heavens/vault a neo-Platonic some-thing else, no doubt by way of medieval Arabic sources (streams / ‘electrical’ so-called cultural currents) … The sky mirrors things-not-in-themselves, or -- depending on your point of view / bias -- everything and/or nothing (at all) … mirroring your worldview … or vice versa (to Stendhal’s “happy few”) … Said Coleridge to Southey …

We went to the new super-supermarket, Globus, and paid the 15 KC for a cart in the US-style vacuous parking lot … To enter the aisles you have to make a hard right just inside the automatic doors and pass through acres of plastic house-wares, plastic clothes, tires, coolers, appliances, etcetera … Nonetheless, when examining eggs, some of them still had feathers on them (plus that now common-place red date-stamp …) … (05/20/04) …

“The mountain rose before me / from a deep well of desire / And the fountain of forgiveness / beyond the ice and the fire …” … Sometimes Skryje is like a prison-house, other times a make-shift monastery (perhaps charterhouse …) … Other-times … Sometimes it seems like a rustic version of a bankrupted (poor) Renaissance villa, situated in the hills, facing down time itself, a therapeutic distance from everything else but itself … And not unlike Back to Ireland, that small stretch of cobble-beach on Iona where reputedly Columba sat, ‘back’ (turned to) Ireland (from whence he came … in self-imposed exile …), here one sits ‘back’ to Praha or ‘back’ to Brno (yet never ‘back’ to New York … because one always needs a way out …) … Et in Arcadia Ego (so ‘they’ say, and write … and argue over …) … All things post-Romantic then … and why not ??? … inclusive of, of course, gardens (“places of best-kept secrets …”) …

In the morning, three cups of coffee (Turkish style) and three cigarettes (Sparta, red pack), back-to-back, one after another … Some bread with butter, two eggs (soft-boiled) with salt and pepper … The spring water is always cold, the well water always dirty (contaminated with silt), the rain almost always falls in-between bursts of brilliant daylight, yet sometimes at night … The dogs next door, across the stream, always bark in the late afternoon, the rooster and his three or four hens always wanders to and fro, along the embankment of the stream, below the garden, the clouds almost always race past, up the valley (west-southwest) … The forest is still, flanking the hills … Silent pines crown the upper reaches, opening to high fields …

No one knows where S’s mom disposes of the spoils of the outhouse since she was admonished for putting it in the compost … It is a rich, dark secret … Perhaps she does away with this surplus matter under cover of darkness (night-soil at nightfall) or at 5 a.m. in the morning … Wherever it goes, now, its end is known only to her (and any other eyes open at the appointed hour) … No one asks … The grass grows greener somewhere … and hopefully the algae bloom in the river is not related to this aporia (non-crescent hole in things) … 

Two days ago we visited a church completed in 1771, based on plans by Santini (1671-1727) … Not ‘pure’ Santini*, this high-Baroque pile struck the eye immediately, with forcefulness, as H’s van descended the bend in the road, entering into the small village of  Krtiny … St. Mary’s (1771), built atop the former site of an indulgence-selling parish in the Middle Ages … that is, site of a former Gothic church sacked by the Hussites in 1424 … Not far away (up the road, around the bend, and atop a hill) a small shrine tucked below linden trees, apparent site of an apparition of the Virgin c.1210 … The statue of the Virgin in the church at Krtiny is said to have vanished from time to time, back then, only to turn up at this ‘preferred’ location, only to be hauled back to the parish HQ below … Baroque angels are said to have turned their backs on the sanctuary of the Gothic church when the priests ignored the Virgin’s wishes to build instead at the site of her visitations … In Santini’s church, the same high-Baroque angels (high above the sanctuary) gesture heavenwards … Frescoes rise above this, above all, by Jan Jiri Etgens (1643-1754), a painted illusion for/of transcendence (transcendental airs … then …) … baroque atmospherics and set pieces … A dove, with outstretched wings, plies (sails across) the space of implied-apotheosis, the zenith, where the plum-colored clouds and amassed saints vanish / melt into thin air (vaporized), into a pale-golden aureole of light (not-light … but lumen … light illuminated from within …) … *Jan Blazej Santini-Aichel, Praha-based architect, son of stone-cutters, one leg possibly shorter than the other (like Byron) … ‘Star’ Santini attractions at Zd’ar nad Sazavou (in north-west Moravia) include the Dolni (Lower) Hrbitov (Cemetery) attached to the Church of Jan Nepomuck (1719-1722) …

Driving along the valley, south, back toward Brno, we stopped at the entrance to a series of now-secured underground caverns / passages that continue up the valley for miles upon miles, carved out of rock by an underground river, and site of an inexplicable Iron-Age (Bronze-Age?) mystery (discovered / unearthed in the late 19th century by a German archaeologist ) … That is, a chieftain buried in a carriage, with his entire entourage … ritual slaughter … Buried with grain, relics, weapons, and an eerie, totemic bull (with gemstone eyes) … The air escaping from the gated entrance to the caverns is bone-chilling cold … Time exhales … The river here vanishes each year, goes below, carving its way through the ancient substrate of Moravia …The valley is littered with medieval light-industrial ruins … smelting, stone-cutting, mining … St. Mary’s at Krtiny marks time in its own way, an eschatological (or is it teleological) full-stop disclosed somewhere in the vague, atmospheric vaults overhead … the vaults below filled with painted skulls … skulls wearing simulated green garlands … a hypothetical outside-time (and a very real inside-time) … A crown set upon an era (era upon era, following eras … until time stops, again, in its tracks … inhales …) … The dream to start again (over again), in unknown-time … some other-time … (05/21/04) …

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GK (RE-EDITED 01/28/06)