The Garden of the Mind: The City & The City by China Mieville

            We don't know who he is, this author with the unusual first name. The paperback edition of his mysteriously wonderful book, "The City & The City," contains no author information whatsoever. Our daughter has recommended this book. It's reputed to be on the boundaries of the real and the surreal, a murder mystery and a fantasy. It slips in its alternative-reality premise carefully, along with a murder here and the usual bureaucratic police context.

            "I unsee them," the narrator says a few pages into the story. An expression? A neologism? A peculiarity of language -- part of the city argot? Our narrator's city is called Beszel. The place has an Eastern European feel to it. Something about the undramatic pessimism of the citizens says Balkans. The narrator makes a reference to Turkey as some other place, not this one. Beszel the city is not a disguised portrait of a real place, but a qualitatively different sort of place.

            It is different because it shares something with a neighboring city, named Ul Qoma. Perhaps the tone there is slightly Middle Eastern or Asian, maybe even similar to one of the Asian tigers since its economy is more prosperous, attracting foreign investment; its architecture newer, more contemporary, lighted by whatever comes after neon.

            What these two cities share is the same space.

            To live in the one, or the other, of these Siamese-twin cities, you must be able to "unsee" whatever place or person does not belong to your city, even if it's in front of your eyes as it often is. To fail to do so is to "breach." And if you are caught, the shadowy super-agents of an uber-authority called by the same name, Breach, comes after you. You disappear.

            So the novel,on the philosophical level, is a parable.  Our world is determined, it suggests, by what we choose to "see" and what we choose not to see. In fact, it might be argued, all our cities, our places of human habitation, are as many different places as the number of their inhabitants. We make our "city" up for ourselves. A house, or building, with people we don't know? We don't see them. We coexist on subways by not looking too closely at strangers. We pass by one another on the sidewalks in silence. We avoid the places some of the "others" seek out, because they are others and we are more comfortable with "us."

            "The City & The City" imagines a rationalization of this mindset. It makes an authoritarian, bureaucratic, legalistic polis from these aspects of living in our own "real" worlds. The book's two cities each train their citizens how to behave and how to unsee. In this respect, the book is an inspired work of speculative fiction.

            Mieville's novel has a mystery plot, a crime to solve. It's also a procedural of law enforcement within these cities' fantastic premise. Assassins strike. International corporations are powerful and shadowy. The cops don't always know who to trust.

            But it's Mieville's brilliant conception of two separate states, one space, and the rules everyone is willing to follow to preserve their status quo that seizes our imagination and feeds it to the end of the journey -- and keeps this book in our thoughts after we put it down.

Gone in a Quincy Minute

            Maybe this is the way the world keeps going.

            Things break, we throw them away. They are made to be replaceable. You cannot get parts for them. The things we buy may be well made, with hearts of iron and bones of steel, but the soft tissues is plastic. It's the dial, the switch, the contraption on the dashboard, the dial in the window that goes.

            The microwave that "wore out," the toaster-oven that stopped working. The door on the refrigerator got out of alignment. It's still cold inside, but the door won't shut properly so the motor runs constantly. These things must go. They are not repairable. No one sells the medicine for them. No general practitioner for all things material sets up shop among us.

            When our things break down, we do what everyone does. We throw them out. In the city of Quincy, Massachusetts, the means of disposal for almost everything  (and everything so far we've tried to get rid of this way) is to lug the item out to the curb on garbage pickup day.      

            But sometimes you don't have to wait for pickup day. You simply deposit your item on the public side of the curb stone, turn your back, and it vanishes. You lug leftover shingles from the house repair project to the roadside, walk back indoors and hear the vehicle that gleefully acquired the stuff you wished to dispose of drive way.

            We gave up on an outsized barbeque grill that was not, confidentially, very old but proved to be the wrong size for a small household. Its capacity was enormous; Boy Scout troop size, regimental. My wife, who purchased it only to discover, upon assembly (hers, not mine; I stay the hell away), that it proved to be twice as large as she had imagined convinced me it was not evil to buy a smaller grill to replace the oversize one, for "convenience."

            We did so. I dragged the awkward metal skeleton of the rejected item to the curb on the same afternoon, as it happened, that some skilled operative arrived to attach the new microwave to the new shelf. He was driving some sort of van. He looked at the grill on the curb, and on entering the house spoke the sentence I knew was coming.

            "You don't want it?"

            "Nope."

            He signaled outdoors, and his wife and kid hopped out of the van and hauled the oversize grill into the back. Repairmen sometimes arrive at our house with their family in tow.

            So last night, I am taking out the trash, hefting a week's worth of newspapers, enough weight to keep me from expanding our subscription list. Then come the other recyclables; then the unredeemable trash (mostly plastic wrappings and kitty litter). And then the moment arrives to unburden our lives of the old portable electric radiator. I have used it for years. It is full of perfectly satisfactory metal and the part that makes the heat probably still works, but I broke the plastic on-off dial a half a year ago. Anne jerryrigged it together; then she broke that finagle, and we eventually got to the point where we couldn't turn it on. This greatly diminished its usefulness.

            The time came for our final goodbye. I heaved it up; it was heavy, awkward. I took care in manhandling it down the porch steps and settling it down in a stable position (I had broken a wheel too) on the curb next to the serious, routine garbage. It was dark out.

            By this time I was aware of hearing what could only be a car engine, idling. It was the only car with its engine running anywhere in our inordinately peaceful neighborhood. Sometimes, however, people stop at this corner and pond their next move. Were they lost?

            I turned. The woman was already out of the passenger seat.

            "We're going to pick that up," she said, with a certain hypothetical tone to her voice. "If you don't mind."

            "Of course not. But it doesn't work," I added, entirely unnecessarily. She knew that.

            She said some version of "it doesn't matter." And then she repeated the same phrase as before: "We're just going to pick it up."

            Pick it up? Are you, madam, impersonating a garbage truck?

            But no, it's not garbage. It's stuff, material, metal in this case, on its way to being redistributed.

            The man was now out of the car, the trunk popped, and he's shuffling things around back, discussing the new arrangement with his wife in a foreign language, making room for their latest 'pickup.'

            They were gone, in a Quincy minute, before I made it back indoors.

            I wondered where my old portable electrical radiator was going and what it would be doing next. But in a way I knew.

            It was going to remake the world.

           

A Murmuration of Starlings

Birds swarm, as do insects, and they do it at dusk, at end of day, and also in the fall, by some reports gathering in the hundreds of thousands and turning the sky black with their sheer numbers.

            While the "black sky" swarming of birds (second photo on left), particularly in Europe in countries like Denmark and England, is well remarked on, I can't find anyone with anything to say as to why black birds do something similar in more modest, but still unlikely numbers in the residential neighbors of cities, towns and suburbs. They gather in scores and hundreds in trees or overgrown shrubbery thickets and chirp for hours; then swoop in considerable numbers from place to place for no discernible reason.

            A flock of raging black birds poured through our neighborhood one morning last week. They were black. I can't swear they were starlings but that's where suspicion naturally falls since the large-scale swarming behavior -- those turn the sky black phenomena -- is the work of starlings.

            The dominant quality of this experience for me was the noise. I heard them before I saw them. They overwhelmed the whir of the leaf blower from half a block away I had been silently cursing; proved far louder than the gentle murmur of our new "ductless split" a/c-heating system internal component (I'm still working on getting this lingo down).

            What is this I'm hearing? I asked myself. Not an electrical or mechanical noise. Not an engine or a vehicle. Or electronic or amplified sound. That left natural. Since we've never been swarmed by locusts and these white-noises sounded familiar, it had to be birds.

            I ran outside and saw them.

            A flock of raging black birds poured through the neighborhood. Hitchcockesque for a moment. Black wings cleave the air, sluicing the branches of the tree, over the vines and shrubs.

            Their voices like a chorus of immortals, or maenads, telling of matters heavenly, divine, beyond our ken.

            They flew through our maple tree and all the green eruptions that mark the boundary between our yard and our neighbor's, most of these dark angels descending on the flat green grass of the lawn next door, as if some banquet hidden to other eyes, other senses, lay spread on the green surface for them and only them (top photo).

            They persist but a minute or two before pouring over our back fences to the properties beyond us; then a half minute later whipped back through our yards again, barely touching the invisible green banquet that held them fast just a moment before, on their way across their street to the next parched paradise behind a wire fence.

            Their numbers dwindled after that. Or else my ears forgot to hear them, my senses fell into a decline.   

            But convinced that no ordinary, common language words described this phenomenon -- or the the sensory experience of a sudden fury of bird chatter raking the air on your block -- I searched online and found a 'flock' of great words for assemblies of birds.  

            I'll start off with the best and the most appropriate for the neighborhood close-to-home experience of black bird swarm: A murmuration of starlings.

            The phrase was widely attributed to a 15th century English poet named John Lydgate, said to be a follower of Chaucer. As discovered eventually at http://baltimorebirdclub.org/gnlist.html, here are some of the others:

A bevy of quail

A bouquet of pheasants

A brood of hens

A building of rooks

A cast of hawks

A charm of finches

A colony of penguins

A company of parrots

A congregation of plovers

A cover of coots

A covey of partridges

A deceit of lapwings

A descent of woodpeckers

A dissimulation of birds

A dole of doves

An exaltation of larks...

            According to the Baltimore Bird Club, many of them first found print in Lydgate's Debate between the Horse, Goose, and Sheep in 1440. Lydgate's terms and other others were then published in The Book of Hawking and Hunting (also known as The Book of St. Albans) by Dame Juliana Barnes in1486. But it's not clear whether these authors invented these terms or merely collected terms in use in their time.

            Nevertheless, I will never hear the hysterical white-noise chorus of an autumn reunion of starlings without thinking, oh, "a murmuration."

            It's louder than a murmur, actually. And the emotive quality is right on the edge of incipient panic and really loud cocktail party chatter, everybody gabbing at once, in a great hall with stone floors and very high ceilings.

            Maybe, in their way, autumn is cocktail time for starlings.

The Warmth Within the Chill

 

It's the cozy time of year. A cozy moment waits inside every chilly one. The return of the warmth is the innate complement, the yin to the yang, to the chill in the weather.

            The season's great early twilights draw us out. The golden slanting light of the early sunset turn the field grasses a marvelous bronze. The warmth of returning indoors is the finish -- like the finish of a good wine -- of that fast-paced ramble through the bronze grasses to gaze at the purple undersides of clouds fired by the fast-declining sun.

            The low, late autumn sun enriches the color of the turning leaves. The particolored pale yellows and oranges glow like fiery coals. They burn inside us. We know we need that fire. When we go indoors, out of the turning-season's chill, we expect it.

            In the chill half of the year, keeping warm is what life is about. It's the pre-condition for everything else. But it's not only a necessity, it's a pleasure, an ancient pleasure; the ancient, age-old longing for the hearth. We're OK with getting cold, with being outdoors in the cold, because we know we can get warm again. Night will fall, and the fires will be lit, even if they are the electrical or fossil-fuel sort.        

            And the cold nights, our need for the warmth of our home fires will likely, if we are at all fortunate, throw us together with other warm bodies. Because the weather gets chilly, we find one another.

            It's "cozy," as Anne says each year when she celebrates the arrival of another cold season, to go inside a warm house, put the kettle on for tea, and share a blanket on the couch.

            I resist closing the door on the warm season. I put on a winter jacket to go outdoors and give the flower pots on the porch another watering. As long as you water them most flowering plants will keep going until we get a genuine hard frost. Flowers are still hanging on some of the mums. The potted hibiscus still offers up new buds.

            But larger forces call the tune. When we lived in the country, winter arrived with a load of a wood in the back of a truck, a big truck that dumped a very large load of firewood, some considerable number of cords, in front of the house. You stacked the wood; then you split it; then you carried it indoors, armful by armful, as needed. Then you fed it into the stove. When you rely on wood fires to keep warm, you generally wake to a cold morning because the fire is either low, or out.

            I stayed in bed in those days because Anne started her days earlier and therefore was up first to make the fire. That part of things, Anne up first and me staying in bed in hopes that the house warms up soon, is still part of the seasonal equation, even though we rely on thermostats rather than wood to keep warm.

            But it's the chill that makes the warm. We go out to watch the leaves blow in the breeze, the clouds rush overhead, the trees turn bare (eventually); we go out to fire up the blood with a good, swift walk. And then when we get back indoors, the chill leaves our body, we nestle in to watch the sun go down, and (as Anne says) get cozy.