Tag Archives: civilization

The Greek In Griffith Park

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Malosma laurina, laurel sumac

A keystone species in the ecology of the Santa Monica Mountains; it puts the Laurel into Laurel Canyon. Not really a laurel of course; but a sumac. (‘Early Settlers’ thought the leaves looked like European bay laurel (Laurus nobilis, Apollo’s bay, the leafed-crown-of-Fame. This seeing of bays everywhere was a trend…as we’ll see later.)

Peritoma arborea… the bladderpod. An Aristotelian freak, a kink in the Great Chain of Being, a living koan, Stoic philosophy in a shrub. I’ve read online, that the bladders make a spicy, crunchy snack, but you’ve got to first get past the offensive, orduriferous scent of the leaves to collect them. Consider that irony; you’ll go mad if you do, be tortured if you don’t.

  • CONSIDER THE BLADDERPOD
  • All that there is to know, the bladderpod knows.
  • Only consider, and you’ll know all the bladderpod knows, too.

The middle canyon (above Fern Dell, below the Observatory) is dominated by an olive grove. I’m almost certain the gnarled trunks and gray-green leaves signify Olea europaea — the gift of Athena to the polis of Athens on the day of its founding:

(The new citizens of Athens got to choose who would be their chief patron god. The field included all the local favorites, but in late polling it was neck-and-neck between Athena and Poseidon. To curry citizens’ favor, the Sea-god’s gambit was a violent earthquake that sent a hot salt-spring geyser gushing up through the Acropolis rock, running through the city and foaming through the agora. You could hear one hand clapping after this spectacle performance. Then Wisdom upstaged Poseidon completely by merely extending her bare arm, and offering the olive tree, which took root right there in the cleft rock. Critics raved, civilization ran, and word-of-mouth was great.) I have no idea why a grove of olives (wilsonii fruitless, I hope?) should prevail here, but maybe it was planted to offset the parchitecture for postcards. (Or they might be invasives…beware of Greeks bearing gifts. Maybe they’re Russian olives..I don’t think they’re Mission olive descendants.) Anyway, the grove is cool and lovely and thought-provoking to be under, and half-way hikers will be glad of the shade.

We have Plato to thank for the simple idea that God is perfect, and what is perfect is God, and nothing we see or do here on Earth is perfect, since we are not God, but we may glimpse intimations of perfection in nature and understand we must be in the presence of the divine, and are then capable of being invited to imagine the Ideal World of Forms just beyond the grasp of our physical senses. But if we can’t glimpse such perfection, and aren’t able to image the infinity of God’s Ideal Forms, we can still imagine that we can imagine perfection, from seeing things that aren’t perfect but maybe just awfully pretty — and hope and grace will do the saving rest. That’s the idea, anyway: add water and olive oil and it makes Western Civ. This graceful specimen is close to the Ideal Form of the lemonade berry tree. It is the Heddy Lamar of all the lemonade berry trees, balanced, tapered, stacked. Bright green leaves, vigorous growth. This is the kind of ideally beautiful lemonade tree, that fills the other lemonade berry trees with self-loathing and despair, and leaves them feeling stunted and hemmed-in and mis-shapen and cheated by life and doomed to hell, for sure.
Rhus integrifolia, the lemonade berry, from which berries in winter, a sweet-tart drink can be pressed.

THE STAR OF THE OBLONG THICKET

Patient Reader, recall that oblong thickets are good structures to look at, to spot rare chaparral plants. Here’s one such thicket just off the trail — and by gum there’s a Nevins barberry gesticulating proudly at the uphill end (and maybe another peeking out the back)! One of the rarest plants on earth, this example was not noted on the Griffith Park specimen map. This whole park, this gift of Griffith, this grant to Los Feliz, this Tongva glade, this wee bit hill and glen, just happens to hold the preponderant remaining world community of this dazzler of the CFP.

THE SPICY SCENT OF A BAY GROVE — Another CFP plant reminded California immigrants of Apollo’s noble bay tree, so they called it California bay. This magnificent tree is a bit similar to the European laurel, but it is completely unrelated. What is most remarkable is that this tree, by convergent evolution, exudes that heady bay fragrance, just like culinary bay, from oils in the leaves. Just like a grove of laurel in a Roman garden, Umbellularia californica perfumes the area under its canopy with divine scent.

“INSPIRING QUOTE HERE”: Col. Griffith J. Griffith made some inspiring statements when he donated the land for the park. He argued eloquently for the education of the masses in natural history, and uplift!, and progress, and trusting to nature’s regenerative powers. I know the quotes, but not verbatim. I blogged about them years ago, but couldn’t retrieve that article from my own blog. I may have reluctantly deleted the post when I temporarily ran out of space. Anyway now, those quotes, common coin for conservationists and reproduced in print and on bronze and terracotta plaques for 100 years, no longer exist. So I can’t document and illuminate for you, in his words, how much Griffith admired the Greeks and their democracy, and stressed common equality of access to nature and the good things of the polis. But I found out today we can no longer cut-and-copy blocks of text; you have to transcribe the whole text yourself from one screen to another, if you can even manage to hunt it down unedited and in one piece.

  • Fern Dell, the park’s prettiest grove, and a living museum.

Nor will Google bring up entries anymore for the old public domain books, histories or articles micro-fiched generations ago from moldering leather-bound tomes, which reproduced those remarks. Indeed, you won’t find any reference to a book or record that isn’t physically commercially in print by a major publisher and for sale (If the book’s for sale NOW on Amazon, Google will let you know it exists, but not let you see the text.) If nobody else has noticed what has suddenly and quietly happened, the View has. This is outrageous, this is Orwell; this is Himmler, this is the sack of the Alexandrian Library, this is rentierisme, this is the Dark Ages for man, this is the Inquisition, this is the final snuffing out of any hope for democracy. It is the Inquisition for our common knowledge, a permanent trap-door slide for our species down to eternal barbarism. If an individual fellow can not organize his own information, researching inexpensively and at his own pace and direction from the public sources bequeathed to us by Franklin and Jefferson and generations of scholars and dedicated public servants, but instead must crawl to the bot, taxed and tolled and kept ignorant of the richest sources, it is death for America. Here is the enclosure of the human mind; a kick in the head for public education, and the fatal blow to our common civic heritage. If this sticks (and some of Google’s outrageous ‘innovations’ mysteriously don’t), there’s almost no point going on from here. Sigh. With that, enjoy the the plants, they might not be here very long either.

Embracing China

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7/7 — The Night of the Celestial Lovers — Qixi Festival

In traditional Chinese astrology: on the night of the seventh of the seventh, Niulang the Cowherd (Altair) reaches across the darkness to embrace his lucky star, Zhinu the Weaver Girl (Vega).

“Niulang was an orphan who lived with his brother and sister-in-law. He was often abused by his sister-in-law. They eventually kicked him out of the house, and gave him nothing but an old cow. One day, the old cow suddenly spoke out, telling Niulang that a fairy will come, and that she is Zhinu, the heavenly weaver. It said the fairy will stay here if she fails to go back to heaven before morning. In accordance with what the old cow said, Niulang saw Zhinu, and fell in love with her, and they got married. The Emperor of Heaven, the Jade Emperor, found out about this and was furious; so he sent minions to escort the heavenly weaver back to heaven. Niulang was heartbroken and decided to chase after them. However, the Queen Mother of the West drew a Silver River (The Milky Way) in the sky and blocked his way. Meanwhile, the love between Niulang and Zhinu moved the Magpies; who built a Bridge of Magpies over the Silver River so the couple could meet. The Jade Emperor was moved by the sight, and allowed this couple to meet on the Magpie Bridge once a year on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month. That was the origin of the Qixi Festival.”

— Thus Spoke Wikipedia

http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php/index.php/message-peace-movement-summary-new-cold-war-china

The New Cold War between the West and China, as Danny Haiphong rightly dubs it, is a disgrace. Click above for his barn-burner of an essay. The sudden whiplash-turn of the National Security State back to Full Tactical Alert On the Threat of China, has amplified indeed weaponized, Pres. Trump’s lazy scattershot calumnies. This isn’t good. The chicken hawks peddle sly, vague hints that somehow China is destabilizing the world, or that China is already on the warpath, a rampant aggressor on the world stage. It is assumed and then circularly re-argued, that they are bent upon nefariously stealing Americans’ future of capitalism by cheats and dodges. It’s the same old prejudice but it is keeping the MIC gravy-train going — though the Pentagon is already vomiting from gorging on the surfeit of its own indigestible sickpiles of previously gluttonized phantom wealth. What’s next, now that Afghanistan is lost?

This New Cold War is cynical and expedient; a gesture, and a Vaudevillian one — a spook-haunted arm-wave from the Deep State meant to distract and decoy from the fact that China and the U.S. are natural allies and partners. The main-stream media children appear to have either swallowed the State Department’s rattling sabre whole; or, and/a, also, just pulled a Big Stick out of their collective ass, by their own little selves. On the wheezing Sunday talk shows, it saves both the pols and the hacks from even having to leak anymore, by endlessly answering the question their non-viewers aren’t even bothering to care to ask anymore: namely, what-the-hell is Bidenism, anyway. Turns out, it’s that He’s Tough On China. He isn’t the One Who Lost It! He told them to Knock It Off! He’s sending gunboats to the Straits of Taiwan. Look, UFO’S!


‘You’ve Got To Be Taught’ The New Cold War is coincident, coincidentally, with a sharp rise in street violence against Asian-Americans. The attacks and the diplomatic fury are emotional steam valves for American people boiling and spoiling for an ugly fight with the Other. But these ignorant fights leave deep scars. A recent correspondent couldn’t recall the song from South Pacific about Anti-Asian prejudice. Hear it again, it still packs a wallop. Oscar Hammerstein took the trouble to introduce the song himself (in a newsreel celebrating “National Brotherhood Week,” believe it or not.)

youtu.be/AAls_gUhlQw

Economic justifications for bashing China or for distrusting Chinese people as a business culture, are completely non-existent, now or ever. Around the Pacific Rim and the Globe, Chinese trading colonies have been the most efficient and enterprising merchant-handlers of goods in world history. And remember, they’re not even Communists any more, folks, remember? They’re not communists, whatever that might mean today, any more than English are Monarchists whatever that might mean today. That is, psts..psst…they aren’t really anymore. China is our Number One trading partner, manufactory of all our bling, and they own the notes on most of our increasingly worthless, rapidly deflating, paper money. The only threat, really, is that they’ll dump all those debt-junked petrodollars one day soon for a rational trading currency of their own, and…glug glug glug for the American Dream, whatever that might mean today.

ON GOLD MOUNTAIN — One of the most remarkable family and social histories I’ve ever read is Lisa See’s story of her Chinese-Anglo California family, which started in America around the time of the Gold Rush, 1856. Hilarious, shocking, it offers wide windows on revealing subjects — like how really-existing global economics operate at family level, across decades — and the roots of American and Chinese mutual prejudice. Only skim some pages for nuggets that suggest the gold buried in See’s story.

Link

Maybe America should ditch capitalism so we can become a brutal despotic one-party planned economy communist nightmare like China. Then maybe we could finally afford nice things, like railroads.

Anyone remember why exactly it is that we were supposed to hate communism? Anyone?…..Because it made people poor and impeded cultural and technologic and economic progress?

Remember when Hong Kong was capitalist, and China wasn’t? Remember when America had railroads, and China didn’t? …..   Anyone….??

Long-distance, high-speed rail arrives in Hong Kong