Elecampane and pippin-pap

Public domain, Wikipedia.
Doman Hering: Judgement of Paris, c. 1529,
Solnhofen limestone, 22 x 19.7 cm;
Paris (the knight) is a portrait of Otto Henry, Elector Palatine,
Hera a portrait of his wife Susanna. Bode-Museum Berlin.

Well, it's not the admirable and most famous Snail Water, but it might come in handy on these cold winter nights...

An approved Conserve for a Cough or Consumption of the Lungs.

Take a pound of Elecampane Roots, draw out the pith, and boil them in
two waters till they be soft, when it is cold put to it the like
quantity of the pap of roasted Pippins, and three times their weight of
brown sugar-candy beaten to powder, stamp these in a Mortar to a
Conserve, whereof take every morning fasting as much as a Walnut for a
week or fortnight together, and afterwards but three times a week.

I wonder if that is the size of a walnut meat, an unopened walnut in its shell, or a great big green unhulled walnut. Whatever it is, the receipt comes from the marvelous A Queens Delight: The Art of Preserving, Conserving and Candying. As also, A right Knowledge of making Perfumes, and Distilling the most Excellent Waters. 

London: Printed by E. Tyler and R. Holt, for Nath.
Brooke, at the Angel in Corn-Hill, near the
Royal Exchange. 1671.

Elecampane? Inula helenium. A.k.a. elfdock and helenio. Horse-heal. It's in the same family as sunflowers, Asteraceae. Helenium refers to that most famous Helen, Helen of Troy. I've seen a number of accounts of her relation to elecampane. Her tears turned to Elecampane, according to one version. Not surprising, I suppose, as desirable young men and women themselves seem to have had a fatal tendency to turn into flowers or trees in the ancient world. But elecampane is enormous. She must have been surrounded by a whole jungle of the stuff; surely she could have wept, lost herself in eight-foot stems, and slipped away, saving a world of trouble. I have also read that she simply carried elecampane with her when she was abducted from Sparta by Paris. Why? Because we women, when abducted, like to carry gigantic flowers? I find such a bouquet rather unlikely, though in the legends of the ancient world, women appear to be vulnerable to abduction when picking flowers. It is a wonder any young women were ever tempted into a field, however pleasantly diapered with flowers.

According to (possibly innumerable and sometimes witchy) herbal web sites, all copying one another, elecampane is beloved of the fey. Then I expect elecampane stalks are fairy skyscrapers. Perhaps the fey linkage is why it's claimed that Celtic peoples saw elecampane as a sacred flower? If you are a lovelorn, superstitious sort and have some spare vervain and mistletoe lying about and some time to waste, evidently you may grind them up and mix them with elecampane flowers for a love potion. And if you have a bad scrying habit, well, elecampane flowers are said to be useful by the sort of people who dabble in witchery--that is, by witches, who suggest that you throw a few on the grill to increase your mystic powers. All this business with love and bewitchment and foretelling the future takes us straight back to Paris and Helen, and to Aphrodite promising Paris that she will make sure he steals away with Helen, wife of Menelaus, if only he declares her the most beautiful. Never mind that she fails to mention the little fleabite of the Trojan War.

Dear people,

Mailbox courtesy of y0s1a and sxc.hu

Today I will be frantically packing up all my overdue packages (including promised books--and that includes the great poetry giveaway going to Guy in Israel, as I am nothing if not a true-to-my-word procrastinator) because Obama is going to be hanging out and pronouncing on issues a mere one block away tomorrow, and that, people tell me, will be a navigational problem. Particularly because of the location of the Cooperstown post office . . .

Also, it seems I must weed my front borders in honor of the president. Because despite my 17 (husband-counted) trilliums, my bleeding hearts, my uvularia, my Jacks in the pulpit, my Virginia bluebells etcetera, my garden looks a little bit overpopulated with stray grasses.

And before I go off to sing in the evening, I hope to write a tiny story and simply must finish reading Deep Exegesis (Milosz, Sophocles, Bach, Joyce, Eliot, Melville, Marvell, Austen, and most of all scripture!) today or else roast for my sins, as I have promised to read it all the way to the end for the priests-and-clergy reading group of central New York. I am visiting their next meeting in the form of token poet and novelist, and I will tell you about it, as it is sure to be . . . different.

This means that I do not have time for a blog post. Kindly purchase all four of my in-print books if you miss me. (Insert adorable emoticons here.)

More news will no doubt materialize tomorrow, when I will be huddling inside my charming though somewhat decrepit federal house and hoping not to be noticed by all the snipers who locals say will be dashing about the rooftops. Bush no. 2 was once at a party at the house behind mine, and I managed not to see either the president on the lawn or the FBI in the alley, so I expect that I will manage a major bout of huddling perfectly well. (My mother, on the other hand, wants me to walk down the street so she can see me on CNN.)

Yrs, with packing string and skittles,
Marly

"the centre cannot hold"

 Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
 Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
 The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
 The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
 The best lack all conviction, while the worst
 Are full of passionate intensity.
              --Yeats

Have been watching the news on the computer, listening to the early morning havoc in Boston. Amazing how much wreck and mayhem two young, wild minds can cause. (For that matter, it's amazing how much damage anhydrous ammonia can do in Texas. Or bombs on the other side of the world.) Outside, the birds have not heard and are chirping of better news, and the flowers have not heard of images and go on standing, cold and inviolate. What a beautiful, terribly fallen world.

Addendum: After some chat about the link and implications of what Yeats says on facebook, I should certainly add that in this instance certainly "the best" have been wonderfully forthcoming with help in Boston. I am glad Yeats is a poet, not a certified prophet!

So sad this week for many of the family of man, including that grieving family on the other side of the world whose sons will not come home again... Little brother on the loose, did you admire your elder brother too much?

Faced with assaults on precious pieces of our world and the post-marathon risk of increasing post-terror militarism in this country, we go on, doing what we must do as part of families and businesses and temples and schools and so on. And so do I, along with a thing I feel meant to do: making stories and poems and attempting to support what is fine and worthy in our culture.

Rabbit with a pocket watch--

Tenniel's White Rabbit

It's barely Maundy Thursday, the taxes are not complete, sleep is needed, and there's a heck of a lot of choral singing lined up for the next four days. I feel like a panicky soprano White Rabbit headed for an appointment with the Duchess. I must say that though I resisted being part of a choir at first, I have learned a great deal about music and added a new gallery to the chambers inside my head.

Despite the fact that the snow is still deep around town, the afternoon sun burning on the front of the house has warmed the beds and revealed snowdrops and aconites. Little shivering souls, my heart goes out to you. You are so desperately sweet and brave. I hope it is your time to drink in the sunshine, although it may be time to be covered in another white blanket.

In important No'then news, I saw two titmice perched in the broken lilac, looking adorably as though it might be time for spring.  Juncos and cardinals and mourning doves and the ever-enduring sparrows pecked at the snow for dropped seed. Lovely.

Illo from Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for THALIAD

In personal news, I heard six bubbly-sounding words from my husband and two from my youngest, coming from deep inside that giant rabbit hole of the Grand Canyon. So that's good. Bit small, but good. I am guessing that they'll finish the rim-to-rim climb late tomorrow and be back on top of the world after four days in the canyon.

Also, "An Incident at Agate Beach" appeared on one of the 10 Awesome lists yesterday. (Timely, as it will be online soon, in its fourth anthology publication, first online publication.) Thanks for fb-tagging, Jeff Ford!

. . . . . . .       . . . . . . .       . . . . . . .

Meeting me elsewhere: excerpts from 2012 books (A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Thaliad, The Foliate Head) at Scribd. Thaliad at Phoenicia Publishing. See page tabs above for review clips and information on those brand new books plus The Throne of Psyche from 2011, and more.

"Nice chicken, honey."

I’m always a bit behind the times in the realm of political ephemera, so I just realized that the son of my high school biology teacher in Cullowhee, North Carolina starred in a Herman Cain ad back in August. If you haven’t seen “He Carried Yellow Flowers,” well, it has the advantages of Nick Searcy, a sense of humor, genre playfulness, and (not least) chickens.

My motto: Chickens loom large.

If you have stalked me in print with maniacal fervor, you may know that one of my short stories (all uncollected, as I have never bothered to try and publish them in more than magazines and anthologies) deals with a biology teacher who I call “Circe.” Circe is a created literary lady and, as such, has nothing to do with Nick Searcy’s flesh-and-blood mama—my Circe lives in a magic world of illusion.

As to the real life woman who faithfully toted her son to campus so that he could be a child actor in university plays: I’m afraid that I gave Mrs. Searcy a great many reasons to dislike me, being full of ginger and silly at 15 and liking to do ridiculous things like investigate how high a frog’s eyeball can bounce. At any rate, there is little doubt that she did not love me, and it was entirely my own fault.

At the end of my story, I give the paper-and-ink biology teacher an enormous present. In real life, I gave my biology teacher a rather small but no-doubt welcome present by deciding not to go on to advanced biology, even though I had an outsize passion for botany. (That year I had collected and catalogued 120+ flower specimens from four states, including wild orchids and carnivorous plants, for a biology assignment. And that was a bit compulsive and mad, wasn’t it?)

So I made both my real life biology teacher and the paper one happy in the end.

May glimpse: the shade garden

When I got home from Wales, the Virginia bluebells and the uvularia were already fading, but trillium and ginger (those little brown jugs!) and some of the dwarf iris, false and true Solomon's seals, celandine poppies, bleeding hearts (white or pink-and-white), and more were in bloom.

My friend Clive has asked me so many times in the past for glimpses of my garden, and at last I shall satisfy him and anybody else who wants a peek. The guilt was quite useful; no doubt it was what prevented me from doing fourteen loads of laundry this morning. But now I shall go upstairs, away from words and flowers and be dutiful. Have a ramble in my garden while I'm gone.

And if you feel like a wrangle with arts and culture, move on down to the previous post. We need brains at work!