woobiquity

iv. Of wordplay and urban forestry

Word re-constructions outside the Camden Arts Centre in Finchley Road:

iii. The prevalence of questionable odors

What's that smell? At the moment it’s probably lilac blossoms, with their wafting, grannyish perfume. It's like guerilla marketing for Penhaligon's. But considering this might briefly overtake some of the city’s more usual odors (most often exuding from substances that have either passed through, been rejected by or should have been washed off people’s bodies), I’m not complaining.

ii. Of victimhood after a storm

Maybe yesterday’s thunder tore something: London had a threatening vibe today. Too many people with busted lips leaning against buildings, with a ‘come on, mate’ look on their faces. Some stocky guy on the escalator at Tottenham Court Road turned abruptly, halfway up, and ran back down. He bumped me, hard enough to take my breath away, and kept going.

The jolts we absorb, when not to would be to invite a full-on storm.

Then on a bench in Russell Square (the place, not the film), where I was trying to believe I wasn't sitting in a traffic island, a young stranger joined me and... asked if I would answer some questions for a student survey. First question: ‘Are you a victim of society or is society a victim of you?’ I said, ‘Well, what day is it?’ and he looked at me like I had just spoken to him in a dead language. The questions got worse, but I did like: ‘If you worked for an advertising agency and God or religion was your client, how would you promote them?’ I said as a Healer, since people are fanatical about health and war and such nowadays, and that's an aspect of God that doesn’t get talked about much. He said, ‘oh, comfort’. I said, um, ok. And he wrote that down instead.

i. Of objects as origin

Spring is dogwood season in the eastern US, where the trees grow wild and lanky in forests, more squat in sun, and because of their weak immune systems are the bane of show-off gardeners. The dogwood (cornus florida) is also the state flower of North Carolina, where I grew up. Why a state needs a flower, I'm not sure, but we had the cheerful fact pounded into us in school, along with a mild resentment for Virginians, who claimed the same bloom.

So of course I noticed this old and healthy specimen near the Observatory in Greenwich Park:

Dogwoods of this sort don't grow naturally in England, and their maximum lifespan is unknown. So... the kind of homesickness only Spring can evoke sends me off on a gilded fantasy in which the tree was shipped back from the doomed English settlement in the Carolinas, as a gift for her majesty, Elizabeth I, whose garden Greenwich Park was at the time.

Of course, cultural 'exchange' works both ways. I dug this out of the photo archives (the shamefully chaotic shopping bag at the bottom of the closet):

As an eye-level garden ornament on the campus of the University of North Carolina, where I did my undergrad studies, the gargoyle looks positively cuddly. But its overstated features would have had a more menacing effect from its original, pre-restoration perch, just above Big Ben.

preamble. Quotation

I might have written a poem for the occasion did I not suffer from an irrational fear of writing poetry (the medical term for the condition escapes me). But this quote from John Muir (thank you Writer's Almanac) sets exactly the right tone for what may follow here. Muir was a conservationist and writer who was born in Scotland in the 1830s but made the whole of the United States his sphere of influence, partly by walking all the way across it.

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."