Trypanophora semihyalina (网锦斑蛾).
This moth was active in the afternoon, carefully exploring several tree trucks in Wangling Park, either looking for food or a place to avoid being disturbed. This is the first time I have noticed one in Changsha though I don't believe they are in fact uncommon here.
So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.Philip K. Dick, ‘Introduction: How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later’, in I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon (London: Grafton Books, 1988), pp. 7-34 (p. 11).
Agenocimbex maculatus (朴童锤角叶蜂).
For the past week I have been watching this clubhorn sawfly larva resting under leaves that it must be vigorously feeding upon during the night. It is lazy and slow to move but did exert itself enough to spit yellow juice on my hand as I gently overturned this leaf.
When I was a child I used to be filled with envy when adults recalled events of twelve or fifteen years before. I would think it must be marvellous, to issue those proclamations of experience – ‘It was at least ten years ago’, or ‘I hadn’t seen him for twenty years’. But chronological prestige is tenacious: once attained, it can’t be shed; it increases moment by moment, day by day, pressing its honours on you until you are lavishly, overly endowed with them. Until you literally sink under them. A centenarian has told me that memory protects one from this burden of experience. Whole segments of time dropped out, she said: ‘Of five or six years, say, around the turn of the century, all I can remember is the dress that someone wore, or the colour of a curtain.’ And I would be pleased, rather than otherwise, at the prospect of remembering Naples in similar terms – a lilac dress Gioconda wore one morning driving to Caserta, or the Siena-coloured curtains of the apartment in San Biagio dei Librai. But memory, at an interval of only fifteen years, is less economical and less poetic, still clouded with effects and what seemed to be their causes. The search is still under way in unlikely places – too assiduous, too attenuated; too far from home.
Eurostus validus (硕蝽).
The last-instar nymph of this beautiful bug: the face is brimming with blueness and personality. It was sitting on a fallen branch on Yuelu Mountain, evidently enjoying the sun as much as I was.
Art is holistic and incarnate—simultaneously addressing the intellect, emotions, imagination, physical senses, and memory without dividing them. Two songs may make identical statements in conceptual terms, but one of them pierces your soul with its beauty while the other bores you into catalepsy. In art, good intentions matter not at all. Both the impact and the meaning of art are embodied in the execution. Beauty is either incarnate, or it remains an intangible abstraction.Dana Gioia, ‘The Catholic Writer Today: Encouraging Catholic writers to renovate and reoccupy their own tradition’, First Things, Dec 2013.
Wrinkly Stinkhorn (Phallus rugulosus, 细皱鬼笔).
A fungus with a somewhat cosmopolitan distribution: this is the first time I have seen on Yuelu Mountain, standing erect in a mix of various new growths and ramie plants. The Latin name means 'wrinkled penis'.
Clive James, Unreliable Memoirs (London: Picador, 1981), p. 134:
Psychology was taught by a faculty composed exclusively of mechanists, behaviourists and logical positivists. They would have made Pavlov sound like a mystic had he been foolish enough to show up. He must have heard about how boring they were, since he never appeared, but it was not for want of having his name invoked. The whole faculty salivated en masse at the mere mention of him. As so often happens, dogmatic contempt for the very idea of the human soul was accompanied by limitless belief in the quantifiability of human personality. On the one hand we were informed that there was no ghost in the machine. On the other we were taught how to administer tests which would measure whether children were well adjusted. But quite a lot of solid information was embedded in the pulp. Since there was nothing I did not write down and memorise, the real information was still there years later when all the theoretical blubber surrounding it had rotted away. A synapse, after all, remains a synapse, even after some clod was tried to convince you that Michelangelo’s talent can be explained in terms of the number and intensity of electrical impulses travelling across it. Or do I mean a ganglion?
Chestnut Bulbul (Hemixos castanonotus, 栗背短脚鹎).
These bulbuls are easiest to find in the forests, especially over the Winter and into the Spring, but they are more obscure in the Summer and I rarely see them in Autumn. This one has been happily singing every morning and evening by a rivulet near the bottom of Yuelu Mountain; I am fortunate enough to often hear it.
Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. NatureVirginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (London: Wordsworth Classics, 2003; 1928), p. 7.
and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together
and they tear each other to pieces.
It is an undeniable fact that undergraduates occasionally get drunk. Moreover, as I have before observed, when they get drunk they do it with a will. But, as in other classes of society, intoxication is rapidly becoming rarer and less respectable. I can remember orgies, which would not now be tolerated, which rose to the pitch of hurling tumblers at each other's heads: one noisy gentleman was temporarily squelched by a friend, who used a large bowl-full of milk-punch in the guise of a helmet, pressing it well down over his head and shoulders ; and they (I will not say we) finished by hunting the soberest man of the party with wild shrieks over the college grounds with the expressed intention of putting him safely to bed. He obstinately declined the proffered assistance.Leslie Stephen, Sketches from Cambridge by A Don (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; 1865), p.77; p.79.
[...]
The intoxicated undergraduate is generally beset by this shadowy idea, that he either has insulted, or immediately ought to insult, the college authorities. It was beautifully illustrated by a pupil of his whom my friend Brown discovered clinging desperately to a tree and trying to drive a corkscrew into the bark. "What on earth are you about?" he inquired. "I'm screwing up that old fool, Brown, into his room," was the touching reply.
Anise-scented Sage (Salvia guaranitica, 深蓝鼠尾草).
At certain times of year, the Yanghu Wetland Park displays substantial flower gardens, but I tend to prefer the half-wild flowers that appear in the less developed parts of the park. This colourful South American sage was minding its own business by one of the many waterways among the native weeds.
Juvenile Black-throated Tit (Aegithalos concinnus, 红头长尾山雀).
One of my favourite local birds. For whatever quirk of nature, this young bushtit lacked its parents orange plumage. It was shy but still aggressively and successfully hunting spiders by Taozi lake.