I dreamt that after carrying a small clod of dirt next to my heart for several days I nursed the dirt with milk from my breast and that the dirt turned into a beautiful woman with whom I had sex. The woman then told me that she was a daughter of Triton named Kalliste and that when I threw the dirt [the woman?] into the sea it would grow into an island for my descendants to live on. Having thwarted all-powerful fire and the sharp claws of bold-plotting lions and the edge of their terrible teeth I would marry one of the Nereids throned on high and see the fine circle of seats in which the lords of sky and sea would be sitting as they gave me gifts and revealed the future strength of my race.
Lords of the sky and sea. The gods of my fathers. Raiders and pirates. Brave as sons of bitches.
Landforms similar in chest-measurement to my (youthful, nubile) island, still rooted—like a young fig tree* on the bosom of Gaia—in her blooming, terrestrial girlhood (i.e still practically a child in earth-years/geological time):
—Sroh-Plom Mountain, “Virtuous Woman's Breast Mountain,” located close to Senmonorom, Senmonorom District, Mondulkiri Province, Cambodia.
—Sweet Sixteen, Matthews Range (Ldoinyo Lenkiyio), Laikipia district, Rift Valley Province, northern Kenya.
—Maiden Paps, twin hills in Caithness, Scotland.
—Pap of Glencoe in the Scottish Highlands.
*Fig-juice by its force (μένος) curdles milk and can fertilize eggs (see Aristotle On the Generation of Animals Bk. II, ch. 3). A strong, mannish girl, sometimes curt with her mother.
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Let me describe the rich volcanic soils of my island (practically a child in earth-years) and her thriving vines.
The viticultural pride of the island is the sweet and strong Vinsanto (Italian: “holy wine”) a dessert wine made from the best sun-dried Assyrtiko, Athiri and Aidani grapes and undergoing long barrel aging (up to twenty or twenty-five years for the top cuvées). It matures to a sweet dark amber-orange unctuous dessert wine that has achieved worldwide fame, possessing the standard Assyrtiko aromas of citrus and minerals layered with overtones of nuts, raisins, figs*, honey and tea.
(*See note on fig-juice supra.)
Slideshow (winning photos of my smiling, youthful bride in full blossom):
—Oia.
—Houses built on the edge of the caldera.
—View of Imerovigli, example of Cycladic architecture.
White wines from the island are extremely dry with a strong citrus scent and mineral and iodide salt aromas contributed by the ashy volcanic soil, whereas barrel aging gives to some of the white wines a slight frankincense aroma, much like Vinsanto. It is not easy to be a winegrower in Santorini. The hot and dry conditions give the soil a very low productivity. The yield per acre is only 10 to 20 percent of the yields that are common in France or California. The island's wines are standardised and protected by the “Vinsanto” and “Santorini” OPAP designations of origin.
Volcanic rocks present from the prior eruptions feature olivine and have a small presence of hornblende.
It may not be easy to be a winegrower in Santorini. It is never easy to be the aging husband of a young bride. But the breasts of the land are so piercingly sweet how can you not want to cradle them in the palms of your hands and gently pump them with your fingers, sucking their green sap, their immature nectar, their sour honey into your dry, aging mouth?
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Let me tell you about my island’s highest mountain (and its god) Baekdu Mountain.
There are a number of monuments on the North Korean side of the mountain. Baekdu Spa is a natural spring and is used for bottled water. Pegae Hill is a camp site of the Korean People's Army (Hangul, Hanja) led by Kim Il-sung during Korea’s struggle against Japanese colonial rule. There are also a number of secret camps which are now open to the public for fun and amusement thanks to Kim Il-sung’s fun-loving grandson Kim Jong-un. There are (were) several waterfalls, including the Hyongje Falls which splits (alas, once split) into two separate falls about a third of the way from the top. Don’t miss the People’s Waterslide Themepark Glorious Victory Amusement City with waterslides built into the concrete spillways of the Hyongje Falls hydroelectric dam.
My island’s mountain was first recorded in the Chinese classic text Shan Hai Jing with the name Buxian Shan (the Mountain with God). It is also called Shanshan Daling (the Big Big Big Mountain) in the Canonical Book of the Eastern Han Dynasty. In the Second Canonical Book of the Tang Dynasty, it was called Taibai Shan (the Grand Old White Mountain). The current Chinese name Changbai Shan (perpetually white mountain) was first used in the Liao Dynasty (907–1125) and then the Jurchen Jin Dynasty (1115–1234).
The Jurchen Jin dynasty (1115–1234) bestowed the title “the King Who Makes the Nation Prosperous and Answers with Miracles” (Xingguo Lingying Wang) on the mountain god in 1172 and it [he?] was promoted to “the Emperor Who Cleared the Sky with Tremendous Sagehood” (Kaitian Hongsheng Emperor) in 1193.
The area is a known habitat for tigers, bears, leopards, wolves, and wild boars. Deer in the mountain forests, which cover the mountain up to about 2000 metres, are of the Paekdusan roe deer kind. Many wild birds such as black grouse, owls, and woodpeckers are known to inhabit the area. The mountain has been identified by BirdLife International as an Important Bird Area (IBA) because it supports a population of scaly-sided mergansers.
(My island happens to be positively chirping with IBA’s—Important Bird Areas. As in a Hieronymous Bosch landscape vessels row through the sky with stately oars, a beet-cheeked Flemish huswife at the tiller, avian aeroscaphes, cranes, geese wend their way across my island’s bright empyrean.)
Sixteen peaks exceeding 2,500 m (8,200 ft) line the caldera rim surrounding Heaven Lake. Water flows north out of the lake, and near the outlet there is a 70 metre (230 ft) waterfall. The mountain is the source of the Songhua, Tumen and Yalu rivers, over which U.S. Army General Charles Hartwell Bonesteel III and Marine Corps Colonel Lewis Burwell “Chesty” Puller, hero of Chosin Reservoir, both brave as sons of bitches, pushed the Red Chinese in 1953. The central section of the mountain rises about 3 mm every year, due to rising levels of magma below the central part of the mountain. The highest peak, called Janggun Peak, is covered in snow about eight months of the year. The modern names of the mountain in Chinese and Korean come from the Sushen or Proto-Jurchen language of the Manchu peoples. Its modern Manchu name is Golmin Šanggiyan Alin or White Mountain. Similarly, its Mongolian name is Ondor Tsagaan Aula, the Lofty White Mountain.
“A shimmering hill,” an Albion Mamelon. Kyrene was built on a chalk cliff.
My island—which was then called Albion—was once inhabited by none but a few giants. These were easily dispatched, the largest one called Goëmagot being tossed over a cliff by my good friend Corineus, never one to let a few ants—or giants—spoil a picnic. (“Bread pasties, tartes, custardes and other delicate jonckettes dipped in honie” says my day planner.) The pleasant situation of the places, the plenty of rivers abounding with fish and the engaging prospect of its woods made myself and company very desirous to fix our habitation there.
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Ancient rock carving on the northwest side of Lake Goblet, a well-rounded volcanic caldera planted on the softly-curving belly of my island some one hundred and eighty kilometers south of the Maiden Paps (or “Sweet Sixteens”). It brims with moisture from the prevailing easterlies. The inscription “What shall we do for our sister who hath no breasts?” is an allusion to the scriptural breasts Faith and Love said to sprout “at the voice of Him who loveth us.”
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Life is hard in a city riddled with temple excavations. Huge stone heads loom in the darkness between the necropolis and the temple of Zeus. Children on BMX bikes hurl Slurpees at a lone man emerging from the corner deli under the shadow of a god’s buttock. Part of my island (a UNESCO World Heritage site) was destroyed in August 2013 by locals to make way for homes and shops. Approximately 200 vaults and tombs were leveled, as well as a section of a viaduct dating to the third century BC. Artifacts were thrown into a nearby river.
In May 2011 a number of objects excavated from my island in 1917 and held in the vault of the National Commercial Bank in Benghazi were stolen. Looters tunneled into the vault and broke into two safes that held the artifacts which were part of the so-called “Benghazi Treasure.” The whereabouts of these objects are currently unknown.
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Major population centers (we are large and contain multitudes): Canterbury. My grandfather’s Dublin. Church Creek, Maryland.
A black rat snake slithers across Maple Dam Road in Church Creek Maryland on the seagrass porches of the Chesapeake Bay.
Very slowly solitude slips round me in St. Stephen's Green. I rest: see pale salmon clouds blossom (Hugh McFadden).
Black rat snake in Maryland. Pale salmon in the sky over Dublin. Coastal sea level rise. Pollute the celestial bed. The wave of Hades breaks over all alike. Greywacke pebbles make up the majority of shingle at Canterbury beach, along with agates, quartz, jaspers and even petrified wood. The pebbles are wack at Birdlings Flat.
An obese land fed fat with an ancient grudge, sinking into the sea. A venomous toad that lives on dungeon vapor. And Aias, who was the most powerful in battle except for Achilles and whom the breath of the unswerving Zephyr conveyed in swift ships to bring back the wife of golden-haired Menelaus from the city of Ilus, walks fields of asphodel. The wave of Hades breaks over all alike. Said that.
Fed fat like ancient grudges indecently plump July plums, so liquidly sweet they wobble on the palm of your hand like fruit-liqueur raindrops, bask on outdoor-stalls in the summer sun: translucent salmon eggs, speckled dinosaur eggs, black amber beauties, pillows of swollen yellow pus cloaked in black crepe. Waves of Hades.
New Orleans neighborhood of Elysian Fields in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. Déclassé purgatory where Blanche Dubois lives with Stanley and Stella Kowalski. Flooded by Hurricane Katrina. Jackie Gleason in the Honeymooners. Déclassé purgatory of Bensonhurst Brooklyn. Flooded by a broken sewer main. To the moon Alice.
Jesus jump down.
And where are my generations? Cheated by a deceitful young bride. Time the all-seeing has found you out. Marriage of water and stone. Time the all-seeping. Polishing your wedding carcanet of river stones. Gray, green and hazel-eyed agates, quartz, jaspers, blond chips of petrified wood. Lunar carbuncles. Painted plums. It ripples like diamond-dust in the low sun, time, scouring the celestial bed with solar pumice.
Flood of memories breached by raw sewage. The thenar of my palm caressing your vulvar fossa. Swollen river channels turbid, muddy. Temple excavations inundated by the sea.
Putting my intrepid resolve to the test I scale the highest Maiden Pap (Mount Nipplecap, standing some thirteen meters proud of her sister Mount Alabaster) scout the surrounding main.
Putting my intrepid resolve to the test. Greek youths, no gunshy neophytes, were wont to dedicate their first hair to the river-godsunblenching unflinchingunwincing sundrenched waters. Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung. My first hair departed long ago for the high seas.
Each man's weird determines his web.
Taking council from the central navel of the tree-clad mother—oracular, eudendrous—I loose the bridle of long-timbered Argo the sea-stallion from his bronze-jawed anchor in the Bay of Harmony and Lucid Reflection (Han Dynasty, 206 BCE–220 CE).
Freshen the gale of songs. Embark on a new adventure. Clean socks! Dry land! No flooded basements!
Birth-strangled babe ditch-delivered by a drab: delivered from swamped ditches in flood-prone coastal plains behold the golden strength of the sun poised glistening at the starting line of another day’s race. We set out for nomad’s country, refuge for white-rumped antelopes, gazelles, hartebeest, asses (not horned asses but those that are called “undrinking”) and the shy giant oryx whose horns grow in the shape of Apollo’s prophetic lyre.
7/31/2015
