Happy Memorial Day weekend, everyone. For your listening pleasure, here's a new song that was inspired by the dissonance of acknowledging beauty (perfect weather, spring flowers, moments of happiness) while grappling (or pretending to grapple) with political turmoil and existential uncertainty a flock of birds.
Link.
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For the past two weeks, the weather has been mostly sunny, dry, and cool. The park is spotted with clumps of flowers, such as this dianthus.
The azaleas are finally starting to retire after an amazing season.
I know I took this picture, but I have no idea where it is. I only know that I want to go back.
As the azaleas recede, the rhododendrons take the stage.
Joined by the roses.
And the bearded irises.
And the poppies.
And the yellow yarrow.
This week, I went to Western Pennsylvania to visit my parents. As I like to do when I'm there, I went for a run through the forest every morning. The May green was exuberant, and I acknowledged the pull of non-urban life. In the city, I have to negotiate so many cars before I reach a path or a trail. The city is a dangerous obstacle course. Wouldn't it be nice to live in a place where I could run through the forest all the time, I think, until I remember the other problems I associate with the suburbs, with the need to drive everywhere at the top of the list. But the forest was beautiful. My only regret was to have missed the trillium, which I believe will be in bloom in a few weeks.
I also spent time with my father, who has moved into the dementia unit of the senior facility where he lives with my mother.
It turns out that dementia, at least in my father's case, is very different than what I expected. In some ways, it's clear he has dementia. He still recognizes me, but his short-term memory is almost completely gone. On the second day I saw him, he didn't realize I had arrived a day earlier and again asked about my flight. Physically, he's very frail and tentative. He tends to view the world around him -- and the problems he has with it (such as bad food from the dining hall) -- with a conspiratorial lens. (Is that a symptom of dementia or from years of watching Fox News? I'm not sure.) But he has an awareness of his condition that I found surprising and at times heartbreaking. He understands that he's losing his mind -- he will refer to it in those terms -- and he approaches his living situation with a kind of stoic resignation that's very much in keeping with his character. Other patients in his facility, by contrast, display very different symptoms: some are angry and easily agitated, some like to play with dolls, some spend their time staring into space. Some are not capable of speaking in logical sentences. My father, by contrast, is still able to hold a conversation, and he even played cards. He still likes to tell jokes, although there's often a child-like quality to his humor, like he's making fun of the adults in the room.
There's a part of me that hopes that his body gives out before his mind. It would be hard to see him without any capacity to talk or wise-crack the way he's always done.
The only certainty is that we're all on a path that leads us into the trees.
TGIF, everyone. Here's a new [email protected] song to kick off the weekend :)
Instagram is scary, but you can find me there!
This week, the park entered what I think of as 'peak azalea,' when the landscape is dotted with surreal clouds of pink and red and magenta. These are not your basic suburban azaleas. The effect is beautiful, intense, and disruptive. Or maybe the opposite of disruptive, given that it pulls you into a hallucinogenic state rather than breaking you out of it, like, say, an alarm clock will do. In either case, time begins to feel less linear in a park filled with banks of azaleas. It's nice to be reminded that the world can be magical, even if there's an underlying disturbance, a sense of questioning what made you want to leave one world for another.
This week, I also finished a debut novel called Brother & Sister Enter the Forest, by Richard Mirabella, which had a similar effect on me.
As the title suggests, the novel is about two siblings -- a brother and a sister -- who as adults are coming to terms (or not) with a series of traumatic events they endured in their youth. The brother is gay and had a difficult childhood. As a kid, he's something of a loner, he has trouble making friends, and -- most problematically -- he eventually gets involved with an older man, a violent, harrowing relationship that, when it ends, leaves the brother teetering on the edge of a kind of antisocial insanity that clings to him as an adult, even as he tries to interact with conventional society and to develop more stable relationships with his sister and a boyfriend.
Despite being more popular and (at least on the surface) well-adjusted than her brother, the sister is also on the verge of falling apart as she tries to navigate her relationships with her brother, her mother, her boyfriend, and ultimately herself.
The book does many amazing things as it tells these stories, but most remarkable is the seamless way time moves back and forth between the siblings' past and present. Mirabella gives us just enough context to know where we are in the lives of his characters, but without ever using dates or other easy markers. As a result, the book feels almost inexplicably dreamlike (or nightmarish) in the same way that our lives (sometimes) do. There is one present and an almost infinite pool of the past, which ebbs and flows in our awareness without any regard to the actual passage of time.
Mirabella also perfectly captures the way trauma -- particularly when unacknowledged or barely acknowledged -- has a way of seeping into the present, where it continues to poison the life of not only the person who directly suffered, but also the surrounding parties -- family, friends -- who, wittingly or not, are drawn into the chaos, so that, as time passes, the effects of the trauma, perhaps counterintuitively, are compounded.
It's a perfect book for our times, in which we seem to be living in a state of collective denial about what we have done to ourselves, and what we're going to do next.
Stephen received an alert from the New York Botanical Garden saying that because of the recent heat wave, the tree peonies were opening earlier than usual this year. We weren't prepared to visit the the Botanical Garden so soon after our last trip, but I found a few tree peonies in Fort Tryon Park that were also in early bloom. I remembered when we tried to plant tree peonies in our garden. They did well for a few years, but as the surrounding trees grew taller, they didn't get enough sun and they succumbed to mildew and pests.
Fort Tryon Park is also in peak phlox season.
We've also had many varieties of phlox in our garden over the years, but sadly they have all perished, again due to the lack of light. Now we're careful to buy shade-loving plants, which offer a more subdued kind of pleasure.
I thought about Earth Day, which thanks to its limited focus -- one day, lots of small things you can do -- feels increasingly hollow and saccharine in the global-warming era, when it seems we need a new daily holiday called Revolution 24/7 if we are going to restructure society in a way that will address the root problems of global warming and other forms of existential, environmental destruction. But I guess it can't hurt to read about forests, either, as the NYT likes to recommend.
At the very least we could add a subtitle to the holiday each year. Earth Day 2023: Hopelessness and Denial. Earth Day 2023: Carbon Dioxide Levels Higher Than Ever. Earth Day 2023: Sorry, Earth!
But there's still a lot of beauty to be found in the world, as the mind-blowing azaleas reminded me.
Earth Day 2023: A Retreat Into Psychedelic Flowers
This week, the most interesting show on television was the natural world, which was busy leafing out and flowering.
A week ago, our garden looked kind of sad and empty, and now it looks less sad and less empty.
The epimedium we planted a few years ago is flowering.
Traditionally this plant was called ‘fairy wings’ but I refer to it as ‘a Flock of Seagulls’ after the eighties band.
The camellias are in bloom.
Little pink clouds.
Each flower only lasts a few days, but it’s enough.
So many parts of life are busy and problematic, and it becomes less busy and less problematic in the garden. I’ve been listening to the new Weyes Blood album, which has a beautiful song called “God Turn Me Into a Flower.”
God, turn me into a camellia.
For my birthday this year, Stephen took me on a surprise excursion to the New York Botanical Garden, where the magnolias were 100-percent in bloom. And not I'm saying that in the way people throw around '100-percent' these days in casual conversation; the NYBG has an actual percentage system, and on the day we went, magnolias were at 100, while cherry blossoms (not pictured) were at 40. Sometimes the timing is perfect, and you get 100 percent.
Not that it needs to be choice, but if pressed to pick a day on which to go 100 percent, I'd probably choose magnolias over cherry blossoms. There's something deliciously exhausted about the large, floppy flower petals of the magnolia blossoms, like they had to drag themselves out of bed after a glamorous night on the town. I want to hear all their gossip.
As we approached the magnolia section, I overheard a tour guide explaining that magnolias were named after the Grateful Dead song, "Sugar Magnolia" a French botanist named Pierre Magnol.
According to Wikipedia: Magnolia is a large genus of about 210 to 340 flowering plant species in the subfamily Magnolioideae of the family Magnoliaceae. It is named after French botanist Pierre Magnol. Magnolia is an ancient genus. Appearing before bees evolved, the flowers are theorized to have evolved to encourage pollination by beetles.
I love looking at their gnarled branches.
It's hard to believe that nature decided to give us another spring, after everything we've done to it.
The magnolias are a doorway to another world.
Please, we said, take us with you :)
For your Sunday morning listening pleasure, here’s a new song from [email protected]
(LINK)
And here's another one from earlier in the year that got lost when I was having trouble with my feed.
(LINK)
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ORDER HERE
A RADICAL NEW MYTH ABOUT SEX, FAITH, AND THOSE OF US WHO WILL NEVER DIE
A young boy wanders into the woods of Harlem and witnesses the abduction of his sister by a glowing creature. Forty years later, now working as a New York City homicide detective, Gus is assigned to a case in which he unexpectedly succumbs to a vision that Helen is still alive. To find her, he embarks on an uorthodox investigation that leads to an ancient civilization of gods and the people determined to bring them back.
In this colossal new novel from the author of The Metropolis Case, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice collides with a new religion founded by three corporate office workers, creating something beautiful, illogical, and overwhelming. Part sex manifesto, part religious text, part Manhattan noir—with a dose of deadly serious, internet inspired satire—#gods is a sprawling inquest into the nature of faith and resistance in the modern world. With each turn of the page, #gods will leave you increasingly reborn.
Praise for #gods
“#gods is a mystery, an excavation of myths, an index of modern life, a gay coming-of-age story, an office satire, a lyrical fever dream, a conspiracy. One of the most ambitious novels in recent memory—and a wild, possibly transformative addition to the canon of gay literature—it contains multitudes, and seethes with brilliance.” —Mark Doten, author of The Infernal
“Matthew Gallaway’s #gods is a novel so brilliant, so funny, so full of strange and marvelous things, I couldn’t stop writing OMG WTF I <3 THIS SO MUCH in its margins. It’s rare to find a novel that so dazzlingly reinvigorates age-old meditations on faith and f&!*ing, art and eros. Luminous, enterprising, and sublimely cheeky, #gods tells the story, the myth, the dream of the human soul in all its glorious complexity.” —Suzanne Morrison, author of Yoga Bitch
“Matthew Gallaway’s storytelling manages to be both dreamy and serious; lean and luxurious. His words carry an incantatory power of mythic storytelling where beauty and savagery wrap around each other like bright threads in a gorgeous tapestry.” —Natasha Vargas-Cooper, author of Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America
“If the ancient gods were just like us, only more so, then the same could be said for this strange, wonderful book, in which the mundane sorrows and small triumphs of very ordinary lives glow ever so slightly around the edges, sometimes quite literally. At once an oddly romantic send-up of dead-end office culture and an offbeat supernatural procedural, #gods is terrifically weird, melancholy, sexy, and charming.” —Jacob Bacharach, author of The Bend of the World
'It’s to the credit of Matthew Gallaway’s enchanting, often funny first novel that it doesn’t require a corresponding degree of obsession from readers, but may leave them similarly transported: the book is so well written — there’s hardly a lazy sentence here — and filled with such memorable lead and supporting players that it quickly absorbs you into its worlds.'
-- The New York Times
Music: Death Culture at Sea and Saturnine
Listen or download songs and records from my indie-rock past with Saturnine here and Death Culture at Sea here.
Music Video: Remembrance of Things Past
Watch the rock opera Remembrance of Things Past written and performed by Saturnine and Frances Gibson, starring Bennett Madison and Sheila McClear.
Video: The Chaos Detective
The Chaos Detective is a series about a man searching for 'identity' as he completes assignments from a mysterious organization. Watch the first episode (five parts) on YouTube.