Honey

Honey In The Flesh, 1959. On the back cover (if you turn it sideways) an existential orphan is revealed, with "Taffy-Colored Hair – Blue Eyes."

G.G. Fickling's fictional investigator reminded me immediately of a letter Rilke wrote in 1925 –  

". . . it is our task to impress this provisional, transient earth upon ourselves so deeply, so agonizingly, and so passionately that its essence rises up again "invisibly" within us. We are the bees of the invisible. We ceaselessly gather the honey of the visible and store it in the great golden hive of the invisible."

Images here

Consumerism on Acid

Ant and Bee Go Shopping by Angela Banner was published in 1972 by Kaye and Ward. A complete scan of the whole work can be viewed here (or at least it could when I made this report, even though the sudden and unannounced disappearance or alteration of sources from our wondrous internet is more the rule than the exception). After I read the scan, I decided that I preferred the condensed version, with its stimulating leaps of narrative.The display of shapes with wide red borders against yellow appears on the book's back cover (having nothing to do with anything on the inside of the book, so far as I can tell.) But I rejoice that in addition to common shapes like BALL and PYRAMID, the illustrator added BRICK and EGG and  CAN.

Barberini Artifacts

I had read sad things about the Fontana del Tritone pictured here. It was a "masterpiece of Bernini" now marooned on a traffic island in Piazza Barberini which had been "transformed between the wars into one of the busiest traffic hubs in the city." Bernini, in all good faith, "made a careful study of where the water would fall, but since the water pressure is now lower the full effect can no longer be appreciated: the spray was meant to have reached the scallop shell, and from there the water would brim over into the lower basin."


On an overcast day with not much traffic around, it seemed to me still very beautiful and not more unhappy in its fate than most other survivors of its time. I was not really looking for this solitary Triton balanced high on a structure of dolphins and shells, but only came across it by chance while walking toward Palazzo Barberini, now an art gallery but originally built as a residence by Urban VIII, the same Pope who had commissioned the fountain and whose arms are conspicuously carved into the base.



Spotting the Barberini bees around Rome was the sort of children's game that reliably amused me throughout the whole of my time there.


Most memorably, they turned up in super 3-D on a stair-post inside Castel Sant'Angelo.


It was tempting to read this stone sphere and its burden of predatory bees as a tangible fantasy of global domination that would appeal to almost any Pope, past or present.



The gateposts outside Palazzo Barberini displayed their own marble versions of the bees, carved on a shield between heraldic gryphons.






Piranesi engraved the Palazzo when it was a mere century old, above. Carlo Maderno was the principal architect, assisted by his young nephew, our friend Borromini. Bernini came along later to finish the job. Fondly as I had hoped to see the oval Borromini staircase (below, copyright FEDERICO PIRAS (supivas@gmail.com), it was not accessible when I was there.




More than half the building is still undergoing restoration. Around the back, its quasi-ruinous status was clear. Opinions seemed to agree that the Italian state is doing a thorough and competent job here, but at an extremely slow pace.





The other significant Borromini contribution to the Palazzo was the design for the arched windows on the top story with half-circle borders the same width as the pilasters on the sides. These look pretty restrained for Borromini, but perhaps his uncle toned him down.


In sober truth it has to be confessed that I put a lot more attention into the still-run-down area behind the palace than I had paid to the pristine front.





It struck me that this must have been the way Roman buildings mostly would have appeared to the whole tribe of 19th century writers whose books have shaped my expectations.










These Baroque carpet gardens invariably are photographed full of freshly-planted flowers under sunny skies. To find one all shaggy and forgotten, under clouds, was far more moving.

Flowers & Skulls

Although my daughter's roses and their companion flowers live in a genteel suburb of the East Bay, her apartment in San Francisco is in a reasonably safe but densely urban neighborhood dubbed by real estate agents as the "Tender-Nob" – halfway between the grand hotels and mansions at the top of Nob Hill and the down-and-out grittiness of the Tenderloin at the bottom of that same hill. Walking home from her apartment through the Tenderloin the other day, I took the photos of the skull posters, already halfway toward obliteration by more recent layers of impoverished self-expression.