Self-Referential, Self-Destructive

There’s a conversation going on in our front yard.  For the Gymnosporangium juniperi-virginianae to reproduce, an apple or a quince tree needs to be within a few hundred feet of a juniper tree and out front they’d only need to cross the driveway to make contact.  My wife pointed out a number of dripping, fingered ball sacks on the cedar tree, which I was able to identify as Juniper-apple Rust, a parasite that forms these oddly colored galls that expand dry out and release spores.  Their sole purpose is to find an apple tree to latch  upon.  What a peculiar requirement for reproduction.  One imagines that if humans were victims to gall sack growth a cure would have been found early as they are remarkably unattractive.

I believe I’d mentioned a few weeks back that I’d stopped my daughter, while we were on the way to the post office to mail back some books she’d read for her course.   The mandatory Humanities course all Reed freshman take spent the first half of the year on the corner stones of Western Civilization, the Old Testament, Herodotus, Plato.  I read them along with her.  In the spring they began and then continued remotely, a prolonged look at the Harlem Renaissance.  Presumably there were long debates that resulted in these two areas of focus to the detriment of the rest of human written record, but once again, I was glad to hear she’d gain an understanding of that period.  These books could be sold to next year’s students as used books.  Jean Toomer’s “Cane,” Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” and a “Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader” were all there in the seat.  “Don’t do that.” I said.  “We’ll keep those.”

It must have been some similar course, though an elective certainly, that first exposed me to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.  I’d never read “Cane” and though I’d never normally think to get a portable reader on some topic, this was the logical destination after spending time with Charles Chestnut and Paul Laurence Dunbar who precede the period.  This morning I continued to make my way through this seven-hundred-and-seventy-page collection, which starts off with essays by the various luminaries, introduces poetry and then prose. The scene was self-referential, self-destructive and like any proper renaissance, seemed to be a time, between the wars, when anything was possible.

And indeed, like any renaissance worth considering the spirit is infectious.  Riding my bike up I was considering short stories one could assemble, to explain this particularly odd time we’re living through and the voices one could try to master the dictation of, and the odd juxtapositions of sentimentality and irony.  Up at the bridge over the Walkill I paused and photographed the water itself and tried to capture the motion in a still.  And all the way home my mind was alight, anxious to write.

Sunday, 6/28/20