Introvernia — A personal journal by an HSP (01)
may 27th • wednesday
Just after seven in the morning, a bird I could not identify was rinsing reality clean with its aseptic song. By the time I took the dogs out, the minty breath of the air had already lost every trace of the digested night, yet the fallen horse-chestnut blossoms, folded in on themselves, still filled every furrow in the earth like scattered basmati rice.
may 28th • thursday
The apartment needed oxygen. For months it had been wheezing asthmatically, choking on renovation dust, drifting in delirium. I tilted the kitchen window inward, without raising the blind, not yet tickling the hydra, which, swollen with chronic curiosity, was uncoiling its heavy coils across the balconies on the other side of the street and tirelessly rummaging through drawers — not its own, peering into pots — not its own, taking inventory of secrets — not its own. The sun was drawing a glaring line at the top of the window frame — it was not white, but the union of all the colors in the world. All the arrogance of the sun came to rest on that line, and the light, embracing the kitchen from an unusual angle, took on the softness and color of goose down.
may 30th • saturday
On the way to our ritual Saturday breakfast — milk with coffee and raspberries with sponge cake, ever since the Mallorcan ensaimada disappeared from the menu — the glass facade of the University of Environmental and Life Sciences bore this footnote to Hitchcock — Please beware of aggressive crows nesting beside the water management building.
may 31st • sunday
We repotted the plants, Goblin and I. In the old, dust-powdered barracks, we staged one last prank night for them. We trimmed their insolent beards, shook out the mattresses, backpacks, and moldering sleeping bags. The pots, summoned to morning roll call, stood in a straight row — scrubbed and obedient. Just one short black-earth drill on a training ground of clay pebbles, the ironing of uniforms, the polishing of buttons. At last, the parade. At the head marched the drummers — three little parlor palms with adorable tufts. Then Dracaena and her general's plume, which bloomed like a green waterfall from a thin, hunched little stick. Behind her, Sergeant Pothos in a living coat of braided vines. Next in line — the schefflera, the canteen girl, so hungover she kept dropping both steps and leaves. Bringing up the rear, the tank dragged itself along — Goblin's great hope and great disappointment — Spider's Web Japanese Aralia, which for reasons unknown had fried every umbrella brown and now, in a Byronic gesture, lifted her shamelessly naked stems to the sky.
june 1st • monday
The center of a large city, a quarter lying roughly as far from the main square as the heart from the liver. Fumes, the metallic tang of trams, manholes bloodshot with fermenting soup, and a discordant suspension of other people's notions of painstakingly contrived freshness. The lilacs have already faded, yet the air is still fragrant — sweet and soothing — so, on my way to pick up a package with a shimmering turquoise-and-tangerine shawl inside, I conduct a botanical investigation in the spirit of Abhidharma.
I am no expert on plants — Cornelius will establish the identity of the suspects. I snap quick, terse shots of them from hiding, ugly and useful. A gang of bruisers from the black elderberry, dealing little pills of cream-colored flowers on the cheap, the wind doing the work. Rose usurers — the waspish widow Barock in a frayed apricot skirt, Miss Sympathie, whose great red baseball cap obscures both the sky and common sense, and Gloria Dei with her nicotine-yellowed teeth. A white-haired mock orange, so charming that matrimonial fraud provides him with a steady income. Privet in a Sunday suit with pearl buttons — soon, tired of his new lover, he will slip into his ratty old sweats and start dosing her by degrees. A ring of speculators — Turkish rocket and goutweed — once sown, they spend a long time building an underground network of contacts, then suddenly, without fanfare, start moving in on nearby properties, green squares, and parking spaces. An enterprising false acacia with a clutch full of uncut diamonds and a fake ID. And Japanese spirea — a shady accountant in a candy-pink beret.
The local pushers lay down a solid base note — as long as you don't come too close, don't try to get too friendly, don't shake their hands or slap them on the back, they keep their promise of a syrupy high. Cross the line, and they'll smack you over the head with a mousy little stink. The weekend poisoner and the serial beguiler are responsible for the heart note — at first both equally sensual, intoxicating, thick, and honeyed, but desire soon leaks from the capricious privet as a bitter-almond dew of boredom, while the tireless mock orange spends hours kissing his many fiancées with the bracing tartness of rhubarb stalks. The discreet smuggler and the less discreet roses arrange the top note in different ways — the elegant false acacia keeps the world at bay with the herbal perfume of young lily-of-the-valley, while the gossiping usurers draw in trade with spicy accents of clove and cardamom. Cornelius says only the speculators are innocent, because their vegetal, small-time-hustler aura cannot break through all these ethereal crimes.
And the spirea?
Acrid-scented, sharp, and sarcastic, the spirea secretly pulls the strings.
june 5th • friday
June — still in swaddling clothes — has been given a scolding by autumn, so today a patient dimness is seeping into the kitchen through the narrow gap along the top of the window frame, while a hoarse little intellectual of a drizzle quotes Hughes, Longfellow, Leśmian, and Alice Oswald. I wonder what possessed the cat owner who had decorated the cat netting around the balcony on the western side of the inner courtyard with miniature liquor bottles — at first glance, vodka, though vodka is not usually sold in pale green glass — so that now the whole thing looks like a surrealist Christmas garland. Does his cat drink?
june 9th • tuesday
Of the raw idea for a structural typology of letters — after it had been whisked into a thick eggnog with the yolk of dynastic entanglements for the introduction to AOD — all I was left with was a single sentence, the kernel of the original metaphor — Every library is made of countless capital Is.
june 13th • saturday
On the way to our ritual Saturday breakfast — milk with coffee and a warm-purple muffin, since sponge cake and raspberries were not to be had — under a monochrome sky that looked like Stefka, wind-tugged and twisted into a fit of hysteria — the slaughter of the burdocks and the next-generation golems.
I may have missed the battle scene itself, but the aftermath was still shocking. The limp banners of great leaves, open fractures, soft, ragged bones, and the faintly bitter smell of green blood. Of the host stationed along the curbs, not one had survived. I understand the idea of war — riotous vigor against civilized aesthetics, groundskeepers against weeds — and yet in this case it was a frenzy of overkill, napalm in a kindergarten, Stalingrad and the Somme. Whose enemy is burdock? Who wants so badly to lay waste to those unregarded scraps of poor ground beneath worn fences?
As a grotesque counterpoint to the still-congealing dynamics of this massacre, on the sidewalk in front of the University of Environmental and Life Sciences: a static spatial composition — because surely this was no meeting of human beings. A pocket of dead, mechanical silence in the very middle of the city's noise. Identical positions and grimaces, identical spacing between the statues, arranged in staggered rows of almost total stillness — only the eyes and thumbs are at work, keeping strictly within the frame of the phone keyboard. Golems do not know what the weather is like. They do not feel the cold. They do not look up at clouds. They do not exchange glances, do not joust with words. No name of god will bring them to life, and the wafer of sacred writing under their tongues will dissolve before they even notice it. I pass them by, and a simple thought strikes me — one slaughtered burdock still has more life and feeling in it than these thirty vegetating golems with lungs of clay.
Gloria Lappae!