AUDIO
Honey or honey yellow is redder, stronger, lighter than California green, redder, stronger, lighter than olivesheen, and a skosh redder than Yellowstone
Andujar, Linares, Jaen
The plains of Seville are la sartén de España, a sartén is a frying pan
“So I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best” – William Hazlitt
Pattypan squash is cymling
Yaupons is cassina, a southeastern dahoon holly
No farther than the River of May, the St. Johns, then back north on the other Miami-to-New York Amtrak route, that from Savannah goes, Denmark, Columbia, Camden, Hamlet, Southern Pines, Cary, Raleigh, Rocky Mount and then up the main line through the Virginia Tidewater to Washington
The limpid morning air of Southern Pines in southern North Carolina
A small place of privilege, golf and oblivious arrogance, but very pleasant strolling briefly in it off a train
Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina
In Carolingian times the Church began to be a physical space rather than the community of believers it had been in the catacombs until Constantine and Nicaea in 325
Adoptionism, Arianism, Gnosticism, Marcionism, Montanism
A bronze statuette of Charlemagne in the Louvre from Metz less than a foot high, an orb in one hand, riding stirrupless, looking almost friendly and approachable
Charlemagne spoke Frankish Old High German first, and his Romance Latin was already sliding into French with the Romans gone from Aachen and Liège for four hundred years
Father of Europe
Karl den Store, Karel de Grote, Karel de Grutte, Karl der Große, Karel de Groussen, Carolus Magnus, Carlemany, Charlemagne, Charles le Grand, Charles le Magne, Carlomagno, Carlos Magno, Tchårlumagne, Tchåle li Grand, Karel Veliki, Karol Wielki, Karl-Veur
Himiltrude, Desiderata, Hildegard, Fastrada, Luitgard, were his serial wives
Gersuinda, Madelgard, Amaltrud of Vienne, Regina, and Ethelind, his mistresses
Charlemagne’s 786 Kaiserdom in Aachen, his design, his glory, and his tomb
The Kaiserdom proportioned like a grange or deanery
Elegant and fine, a human scale
Not of the monumental Classical past of the Pantheon, or of Hagia Sophia
Grandeur returned at the time of Speyer and Autun
Already at the peak of the Romanesque, well before High Gothic, the individual soul dwarfed by groin vaults, soaring naves and awe at the hallucinatory brilliance of sunlight through stained glass
Cathedral monuments to the human cost of lifting a culture to utter permanence
As the Mexican and Egyptian pyramids
All to the glory of the godhead of their choice
Theocratic hunches about what complex of ostentatious behavior would give the best chance of life after death
Those powerful, aggrandizing clerics would have been suckers for Wagner and Richard Strauss
Hymns in The Hartford Selection (1799), “God from His throne with Piercing Eye” and “My Soul Would Fain Indulge a Hope”
Money then not quite yet life’s report card
Now the belief system is simpler
Perhaps, perpetually, it’s just a matter of the ruthless ones and the kind ones
That all human affairs boil down to that
Maybe every scintilla of abstract belief is bogus
“…the miserable Lares // scramble to the back of the shrine, // shoving each other and stumbling, // one little god falling over another,’’ – Cavafy, trans. Keeley and Sherrard
The flute’s mercurial moods and the piano’s wide dimensions in Carl Reinecke's Undine Sonata, op. 167
Watch predawn mist lift off the South Fork of the Shenandoah
On route marches, Charlemagne must have often watched mist lift off rivers
Through eastern France, into Italy with its Po Valley flat streams
Charlemagne’s old empire much more warred over and tampered with than Virginia’s Dordogne
With its taupish limestone ridges and sycamores
White beans and cornbread
Late summer corn rustle lost in woosh of moving sky beneath approaching thunderheads
Their tops aglow in the unfinished dusk
“The moon was mixed with flowing rivers, and it was buried in the hearts of lakes, and it trembled on the waters like bright fish” – Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River
Come up upon a four-thousand-years-old bronze door with two bosses of abstract design curved with a nonfunctional seam nearly four meters long, its whole flowing concept cast as if executed freehand
A summer day in the Forbidden City, wandering it stunned, building to building, object to object, agape at the subtlety of the vistas between the temples and pagodas
At Wutasi (Zhenjuesi), Beijing’s Five-Pagodas Temple, Buddha’s footprint, pleasant bamboo-green flower-gardened paths, the pagodas virtually stupa-like
Ming, 1403-1424
Sanskrit script carvings on garden stele and the pagodas themselves
Their stone with an orange tint in the sun
Stepped construction, a design brought to China by fourteenth-century Indian monks
The complex’s wooden buildings were burned out by colonial European troops in 1860, again in 1900, and not rebuilt
“Waiting for the Barbarians”
Chinese terracotta flowerpots and roof tiles are generally gray
North China’s deforested ridges, bare hills, one-story attached houses of pressed gray earth or cinderblocks along snaking streets, corrugated zinc or gray Asian tile roofs
There are very many Chinas
And within Beijing, there is Tiantan’s awesome scale
Tiantan was the site for the Ming emperors to ceremonially define the year for the whole of the Middle Kingdom
They initiated the growing season there by planting the first rice
Colossal enclosures, platforms, triple-tiered stairs, halls, grand avenues, tree-lined parks
From the Second Ring Road walking the north-south axis, nearly three kilometers to Tiantan’s North Gate
All gigantically arranged Buddhist Taoist symbolically
Stone, stone, stone
Flat carapace dome, gray stone cosmology
Implacable in the manner of the ancient Asian geographical vision of the stone bowl of the world resting on the backs of huge tortoises
Implacable
Temper color from pale yellow to dark blue assumed by smooth steel from reheating
