The beginning of wisdom, as the Chinese say, is calling things by their right names. (E. O. Wilson, as cited by Elizabeth J. Rosenthal, Birdwatcher: The Life of Roger Tory Peterson)

Sunday, August 21, 2011

What to Make of All These Vines

August 21, 2010.  Saturday.
Situation:  Yesterday while I was leafing through the Audubon, trying to identify the little pink flowers, I came upon an entry for kudzu vine, and the name rang a bell.  I think this is the name Moi once called all the vines I’ve been calling, rather informally, grape vines; and indeed the leaves in the photo look a lot like what I see growing all around, climbing up trees, clambering over bushes, and sprawling into the goldenrod.  So far this year I’ve yet to see any flowers on this vine, but Audubon says this vine “rarely flowers north of Virginia,” which is encouraging evidence.  By the way Audubon describes the flower of the kudzu vine as “pea-like” and ovoid, and I think this kind of describes the little pink flower I was looking at yesterday: I bet it’s some kind of pea, but I hesitate yet to select any of the examples I see in the book.   Forget what I’ve been saying.  I just asked Moi if she once called those vines kudzu vines; “No, no,” she replied, “I know what kudzu vines are.  We don’t have any.”  “What do you call those vines out there?” I ask.  “Monkey vines,” she says, “Look it up on the computer, if that’s what you call them somebody else will call them that.  Monkey vine, or wild grape vine.”   After awhile, Moi takes me out to the chicken coop where she thinks there might be a kudzu vine growing.  It turns out to be, as even Moi realizes, just a young pokeweed.  But out there we discover another new blue wildflower growing along the coop, with spiked, enfolded leaves.  I’m excited about it because it reminds me of the plants I’ve seen growing along the creek since spring, albeit without flowers (and which I thought might be some kind of grass), and I’m thinking this might be the same thing.  I manage to find a photo in Audubon that looks like what we’re looking at: Asiatic dayflower; and I think this is that or some sort of related dayflower, like the slender dayflower (no photo of that).  These flowers, like the name indicates, only bloom for a day, and I’m anxious to go down to the creek to see what I may find. Moi and I go to the side of the house, where there happens to be a wild grape vine; Moi has said that we seldom see grapes on these vines, but as we’re looking at this one, we see one grape-like berry hanging.  Right now, Moi and Mway have gone to the bedroom to take a nap.  Moi has asked me to chop down some weeds along the house so she can put up a ladder to paint; that’s going to take a lot of work, and then I’ll want to take Mway for a walk afterward (taking the Audubon with me).  So I’m waiting for them to get up from their naps, then I’ll do all that, before going to work with Moi tonight.
State of the Path:  By the time I get done cutting down what is mostly vines (including some poison ivy climbing up the foundation), it’s 3:30, and Mway and I set off on the path.  We have wild grape vines all over the place, but they are most predominant along the old orchard.  Indeed today I note a wild grape vine covering a small black walnut that has leaves the size of dinner plates.  Past the two anthills and just before the boxelders, there are a number of swingable monkey vines; if I haven’t mentioned this before, the path cuts through two monkey vines that form a kind of portal that you have to step through every time you come this way.  If I haven’t mentioned this before, I’m amazed by that, because this is one of my favorite things along the path.  Down by the creek, my hopes build as I approach the stream bank looking for dayflowers, but although I see a lot of the plants that I think are dayflowers (some of it scraggly from the heat), I don’t see one flower. I do see a mushroom, and I wish I knew what kind it was because I’d love to eat it.  Coming up from the swale through the “chokeberries,” my eye falls on the little pink flower.  I try not to think about it, when a couple feet beyond, I spot a second plant of the same thing.  So I whip off my gloves and open up the Audubon, and turn over the tiny little pink flowers, careful not to touch the poison ivy around it.  I really would like to say that these are spurred butterfly peas (the leaves look like the leaves in the photo for just plain butterfly peas).  The flowers look like they’re turned upside down like they’re supposed to be – at least I can’t tell which way is up and which way is down, but the flowers are so tiny, only maybe ¼ inch compared to the ¾ to 1 and ½ inches stated by Audubon.
State of the Creek:  The puddle under the black walnut tree is gone.  Vinyl siding about three feet away from the edge of the water.
The Fetch:  I really don’t feel like tossing the stick today, and I’m relieved when Mway makes only about four fetches.

4 comments:

sisyphus gregor said...

Tomorrow Moi and I are leaving for a couple days to visit her mother. Her mother lives most of the year in Florida, but spends a month or so up with Moi’s brother and sister who still live in upstate New York. The Boy will be here at the house to take care of things, but since he’s working long days, Barb I guess will be coming over in the afternoons to take Mway for her walks. I guess these are now sorrow-laden, though I haven’t been able to detect any attitude change in Mway. She seems to fetch the stick as enthusiastically as she ever did. I don’t see her hanging her head or anything like that. Though come to think of it, her actions remind me a little of the over-emphatic café waiter Sartre describes in Being and Nothingness. But her actions have always seemed like this.
Since I’ll be gone for a couple days, I’ll have to make multiple posts at some point, either tomorrow before I leave, or on Wednesday when I get back. Either way I guess will be fine.

sisyphus gregor said...

In re-reading my blog today (when will I stop doing this?), I can’t help but reiterate my surprise that I didn’t mention the monkey vine portal until this post. After all, monkey vines are among the greatest of plants – when I was a kid, my friends and I would try to climb and swing on them and take pieces of them and smoke them like cigars – these plants were the preeminent plant! I can only guess that I didn’t mention the portal before because I was so occupied with identifying flora and some fauna that when I got home to write my journal I forgot the momentary joy I felt passing through the portal. But in re-reading this blog and reflecting upon the structure of those monkey vines, I am now convinced of the preposterous idea (preposterous, given my views of consciousness) that every time I stepped through the portal I passed from one universe into a parallel universe – what do you know! And what proof do I have that this is so? Only the feeling that I am convinced of it. Which means that I’m now in a universe which is distinguished from other universes by being one where that feeling occurs (though you’d think the feeling would have occurred as I passed through the portal rather than just now). And since, as the reader will eventually discover, the monkey vines eventually fell apart, leaving only a “kind of portal” (though I still continue calling it “a portal”), perhaps I am now stuck in this particular universe (though there’s another monkey vine portal, as I eventually point out, near the outbuilding, which, however, perhaps does not function as a consciousness transferrer because – I don’t know – it’s too close to the house or the chickens interfere with its operation somehow). All of which means, of course, that I started keeping this journal in another universe, one perhaps…well, who knows what the differences could be? Perhaps I started keeping this journal in a universe where the dog I walk is not an Australian blue heeler but an Irish setter or an Afghan hound (certainly Mway has not been following me from universe to universe, because sometimes when I’ve gone through the portal she’s off altogether somewhere else), or the woman I’m married to is not named Moi (Moi doesn’t go through the portal whenever I do either), or we’re not married but brother and sister instead, or I don’t live with a woman at all but have a male companion, Wade say, and Jazz and the Boy are kids we adopted, or my name is not Sisyphus Gregor but Gregor Sisyphus or Gregor Samsa (perhaps in a universe where Kafka never existed) or something else altogether. The possibilities, the combinations, the slight variations, from universe to universe are endless – in one universe, for example, I take a raccoon for a walk everyday and every time we’re in the field we have to fight off – you guessed it – McZombies led by a mad Henry David Thoreau who’s addicted to heroin. In each different universe, this journal, indeed, the whole blog, is automatically revised (even the comments) to fit the circumstances of a particular universe; otherwise a kind of cognitive incoherence would occur between universi – and, what would happen then? the multiverse would collapse into the 11th dimension. If any reader or re-reader of this blog is disturbed by any of this, he or she may wish to be fortified with several jolts of frisson from some of the science fiction or popular physics books I have on my shelves. I don’t have a great deal of science fiction (in another universe I do), but you will find the Complete Science Fiction Treasury of H.G. Wells, the World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Harwell, several Analog and Amazing Stories Anthologies and a Science Reader’s Digest, Calvino’s Cosmicomics, The Year 2000 edited by Harry Harrison, a paperback or two of Frank Herbert – or you could start with Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

sisyphus gregor said...

As for pop physics books, one can find discussions of parallel universes in Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace and Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos. Interestingly, Greene begins his book on advanced theoretical physics by recalling his first encounter, as a teenager, with Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus (which he found on his father’s bookcase), focusing, in particular, on reassessing the essay’s opening words: “There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Whether or not the world has three dimensions or the mind nine or twelve categories comes afterward.”

sisyphus gregor said...

Forget the speculations I make above. Might the parallel universes I’m thinking of here simply be limited to two? The one universe being the three dimensional space projected from a three-brane existing in eleven or so dimensions, the other universe being the two dimensional computer screen (or what once would have been a two dimensional piece of paper) resulting from operations occuring in three dimensions. The monkey vine portals are simply a symbolic reminder of the differences between these two universes. All this would be consistent with the phenomenon of body transfers and the displaced “I” that I talk about elsewhere.