Bloodroot (pauson, red puccoon, Indian paint, red paint) Papaveraceae Sanguinaria Canadensis, April 18, 2005, Hiram, Maine, John Bonanno photograph

Bloodroot, a hardy perennial, is a member of the poppy family and as such, it requires respect. It is a favorite spring plant in my garden and I recommend it as an essential plant in any Goth themed garden. The flowers come and go quickly. Its name (scientific and common) comes from the sticky red/orange sap which flows through the plant. Applied in sufficient quantity it is said to have the ability to destroy flesh! Bloodroot is poisonous in large doses, causing convulsions, vomiting, reduced blood pressure, profuse salivation, and, finally, respiratory failure. If you expand the photograph you can see the orange tint of the sap in the flower stems. Lately it has attracted attention for supposed anti-cancer effects; for what it's worth, it is FDA approved for use in toothpastes for gingivitis. Traditionally, native Americans drank the root tea as a remedy for fever, laryngitis and various lung ailments; also the root was employed as a love charm and the juice as skin paint. It makes an attractive natural dye. I have found that bloodroot will tolerate a surprising amount of sun (but not full sun) for a woodland plant. It is native, but not plentiful in my area of Maine and is grateful for copious organic material and a moist, light soil. It spreads when happy but will never become a nuisance. What a useful and beautiful ornament to the garden!

"My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect."-D.H. Lawrence 'The Letters of D.H. Lawrence', edited by Aldous Huxley, 1957

RIP Sky Saxon (Richard Elvern Marsh) born August 20, 1937, in Salt Lake City, Utah, died June 25, 2009 in Austin, Texas

Of all the high profile celebrity deaths last week, this passing of an obscure garage rocker was most significant to me.
This obituary in the Telegraph.uk tells the tale. I loved the Seeds when I was of that age when you could love bands with wonderful energy, a quirky lead singer, one fantastic mysterioso hypnotic riff which could come in myriad variations and a minimal technical competence which was totally appropriate.
In this video Bettie Page becomes a beautiful angel, dancing to 'I Can't Seem to Make You Mine' in an enchanting tribute to the man, and what I imagine as a sublime welcome to the afterlife.


Love and Peace to you Sky.

"The educated man tries to repress the inferior man in himself, not realizing that by so doing he forces the latter into revolt."-C.G. Jung

"I'm Cracking Up" Photobooth Polaroid Photograph, 1977, John Bonanno

I wish I could remember what was going through my head then. How many photobooths are still around? These cameras produced a unique color tone. But it does looks like I hunger for blood after rising from my coffin. Note the artifacts of time and the artifacts of photography left on the print. Yet I remain remarkably youthful.

"Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there."- Eric Hoffer, 'The Passionate State of Mind'

Graveyard, Hiram, Maine, John Bonanno photo
It was in this cemetery that I recorded, on a Halloween, an EVP (electronic voice phenomena) faintly but clearly and unmistakably, in an archaic accent demanding: "Live well."

"O.E. græf "grave, ditch," from P.Gmc. *graban (cf. O.S. graf, O.Fris. gref, O.H.G. grab "grave, tomb;" O.N. gröf "cave," Goth. graba "ditch"), from PIE base *ghrebh-/*ghrobh- "to dig, to scratch, to scrape" (cf. O.C.S. grobu "grave, tomb"); related to grafan "to dig" (see grave (v.)). From Middle Ages to 17c., they were temporary, crudely marked repositories from which the bones were removed to ossuaries after some years and the grave used for a fresh burial. "Perpetual graves" became common from c.1650. To make (someone) turn in his grave "behave in some way that would have offended the dead person" is first recorded 1888. Graveyard shift "late-night work" is c.1907, from earlier nautical term, in reference to the loneliness of after-hours work."- Online Etymology Dictionary

“Mr Bloom admired the caretaker’s prosperous bulk. All want to be on good terms with him. Decent fellow, John O’Connell, real good sort. Keys: like Keyes’s ad: no fear of anyone getting out. No passout checks. _Habeas corpus_. I must see about that ad after the funeral. Did I write Ballsbridge on the envelope I took to cover when she disturbed me writing to Martha? Hope it’s not chucked in the dead letter office. Be the better of a shave. Grey sprouting beard. That’s the first sign when the hairs come out grey. And temper getting cross. Silver threads among the grey. Fancy being his wife. Wonder he had the gumption to propose to any girl. Come out and live in the graveyard. Dangle that before her. It might thrill her first. Courting death... Shades of night hovering here with all the dead stretched about. The shadows of the tombs when churchyards yawn and Daniel O’Connell must be a descendant I suppose who is this used to say he was a queer breedy man great catholic all the same like a big giant in the dark. Will o’ the wisp. Gas of graves. Want to keep her mind off it to conceive at all. Women especially are so touchy. Tell her a ghost story in bed to make her sleep. Have you ever seen a ghost? Well, I have. It was a pitchdark night. The clock was on the stroke of twelve. Still they’d kiss all right if properly keyed up. Whores in Turkish graveyards. Learn anything if taken young. You might pick up a young widow here. Men like that. Love among the tombstones.” Romeo. Spice of pleasure. In the midst of death we are in life. Both ends meet. Tantalising for the poor dead. Smell of grilled beefsteaks to the starving. Gnawing their vitals. Desire to grig people. Molly wanting to do it at the window. Eight children he has anyway.”-James Joyce, Ulysses

"Good Friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here:
Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones."-Shakespeare's gravestone

"Or to take another eminent example, in which not Puritanism only, but, one may say, the whole religious world, by their mechanical use of St. Paul's writings, can be shown to miss or change his real meaning. The whole religious world, one may say, use now the word resurrection,--a word which is so often in their thoughts and on their lips, and which they find so often in St. Paul's writings,--in one sense only. They use it to mean a rising again after the physical death of the body. Now it is quite true that St. Paul speaks of resurrection in this sense, that he tries to describe and explain it, and that he condemns those who doubt and deny it. But it is true, also, that in nine cases out of ten where St. Paul thinks and speaks of resurrection, he thinks and speaks of it in a sense different from this; in the sense of a rising to a new life before the physical death of the body, and not after it. The idea on which we have already touched, the profound idea of being baptized into the death of the great exemplar of self-devotion and self- annulment, of repeating in our own person, by virtue of identification with our exemplar, his course of self-devotion and self-annulment, and of thus coming, within the limits of our present life, to a new life, in which, as in the death going before it, we are identified with our exemplar,--this is the fruitful and original conception of being risen with Christ which possesses the mind of St. Paul, and this is the central point round which, with such incomparable emotion and eloquence, all his teaching moves. For him, the life after our physical death is really in the main but a consequence and continuation of the inexhaustible energy of the new life thus originated on this side the grave."-Matthew Arnold, Culture And Anarchy

"Gloved Dance" John Bonanno, watercolor, 1990, $150

"Glove-O.E. glof "covering for the hand," also "palm of the hand," from P.Gmc. *galofo (cf. O.N. glofi), probably from *ga- collective prefix + *lofi "hand" (cf. O.N. lofi, M.E. love, Goth. lofa "flat of the hand"). Ger. Handschuh, the usual word for "glove," lit. "hand-shoe" (O.H.G. hantscuoh; also Dan., Swed. hantsche) is represented by O.E. Handscio, but this is only attested as a proper name. To fit like a glove is first recorded 1771."-Online Etymology Dictionary

"A pure hand needs no glove to cover it." - Nathaniel Hawthorne

“See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand!
O that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek!”-William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

"It was a peaceful day. The gentleman with the glasses opposite Father Conmee had finished explaining and looked down. His wife, Father Conmee supposed. A tiny yawn opened the mouth of the wife of the gentleman with the glasses. She raised her small gloved fist, yawned ever so gently, tiptapping her small gloved fist on her opening mouth and smiled tinily, sweetly."-James Joyce, Ulysses

The following glove references, in this order, appear in Ulysses:

"I want puce gloves and green boots."
puce gloves
kid gloves
gloved hand
rich gloved hand
"Never put a dress on her back like it. Fitted her like a glove, shoulders and hips."
canary gloves
"one plump kid glove"
"his other plump glovepalm"
small gloved fist
small gloved fist
"Father Conmee drew off his gloves"
violet gloves
"It was a historic and a hefty battle when Myler and Percy were scheduled to don the gloves for the purse of fifty sovereigns."
kid gloves
"Cigary gloves long John had on his desk the other day."
"Bloom, raising a policeman's whitegloved hand, blunders stifflegged out of the track."
"elbowlength ivory gloves"
glovers
"doeskin gloves rolled back from a coral wristlet"
"fortythreebutton gloves newpowdered with talc"
warmgloved
"lovely ladies saling gloves"
canary gloves
"Clipclaps glovesilent hands"
"a pair of long yellow ladies' gloves"
"the present of Byron's poems and the three pairs of gloves"
"touch him with my veil and gloves on going out I kiss then would send them all spinning"
"I did I forgot my suede gloves on the seat behind"
"he kissed me in the eye of my glove and I had to take it off"
"he pestered me to say yes till I took off my glove slowly watching him"
"when I put on my gloves and hat at the window to show I was going out"
"when I put the chair against the door just as I was washing myself there below with the glove"

“It's a pretty sure thing that the player's bat is what speaks loudest when it's contract time, but there are moments when the glove has the last word.”-Brooks Robinson

"If it doesn't fit, you must acquit."-Johnnie Cochran