Just inside the Southeast corner of Fort Greene park is a towering Himalayan White Pine.
It’s one of those trees that demands your attention as you walk past. “Stop your steps, look up a moment!” Its branches bear finger-like fronds that brush in the wind. It’s comfortable in its majesty. I know that it is a Himalayan White Pine because a sign at its foot says so. And as I stood there this week, I wondered whether, despite the apparent comfort, it’s lonely, displaced, aware of its origins in mountainous terrain while stuck in a curated park, surrounded by city blocks.
On the subway ride home I looked more into the trees of Fort Greene Park. It turns out that many, probably this one included, were planted when the park was first designed in in the 1860s by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, with the intention of featuring trees from around the world. You can do a “tree tour” of the park following a map (the Himalayan White Pine in the Southeast corner is number 15).
I was reminded of the Glyptoteket’s Winter Garden in Copenhagen, where with fishing nets hanging from the ceiling the artist Alia Farid interrogated the process of transporting palm trees - and other objects - from their local habitats to create an environment for Europeans to enjoy. The movement of trees echoes that of humans of course, transplanted voluntarily, and involuntarily, and through processes in-between the two, from place to place, continent to continent.
On reflection I’ve come to see the pine another way. As neither severed and sad, nor oblivious to its displacement, but as an honest connection between North America’s Atlantic Coast (specifically, Brooklyn, New York City) and the towering Himalayas so many thousands of miles away - where other white pines brush their fronds through the sky.
“We’ll see all the wrinkles from here,” said a woman sitting in the theatre’s 2nd row before 33 Variations begun, starring Jane Fonda. Mu and I had wangled affordable seats and were in the first row. We certainly did have a good view of the wrinkles. Fonda was striking on the stage but also vulnerable. Which was appropriate as she was acting a musicologist suffering from a debilitating disease which progressively worsened throughout the play, while she pursued her obsession with Beethoven’s obsession with Diabelli’s ostensibly unremarkable waltz (on which he wrote 33 variations) while his hearing and health progressively worsened too.
At the end of the play Fonda’s character comes to a conclusion, of sorts, on Beethoven's intentions with those 33 Variations. Through his persistent musical mining of that one piece he demonstrated the power of holding still. Of treasuring a single moment, or in this case a single snippet of music, and revealing the multitudes of meaning and beauty it contains. The message has resonated with moments from before and after seeing the play. When I walked through Central Park to hear Le Clézio talk, from the flank of the Museum of Natural History at West 81st across to East 86th, I’d thought about writing a full story about just that one 15-minute walk. Slowing right down. Its ingredients would include: the woman sitting with her dog beneath a tree on a hillock raised above the pathway, the evening sun spilling onto them through the leaves; the echo of my footsteps under the restored Winterdale arch (described at the bottom of this page along with lots of others); Trish Mayo and her silver tangled branches on the roof of the Met. Then on the SONYA (South of the Navy Yard Artists) studio stroll in Fort Greene, Brooklyn with W, A and SK yesterday afternoon we encountered artists who freeze moments in time, like W’s friend the potter Ragnar Naess, and Valerie Willams, who used an electron microscope to capture magnified images of sand grains and plants.
As the narrator says in Paul Auster's Ghosts (part of the New York Trilogy) that I re-read this weekend, “...the present is no less dark than the past, and its mystery is equal to anything the future might hold.”
The SONYA stroll was as interesting for the intriguing glimpses into Fort Greene indoor spaces as it was for the art in them. There was Ragnar’s house on Hall Street. The whole of the downstairs is his studio, lit when we were there by white spring light that entered through a large window at one end of the room and that rubbed the edges of clay sculptures, paint tubes, wooden work-surfaces, a clock with a different bird for each number and a black cat who wove in and out of it all. The window opened onto a tangled garden that was almost fluorescent. There was 112 Washington Avenue, a rickety four-storey house crammed with artists’ studios where we encountered a slobbering Saint Bernard and where the artistic highlight was the fabulous Haitian-American painter Francks Décéus. Of course the studios with closed doors but chinks in them were more interesting than those we could wander freely into, offering up glimpses of a carpenter at work, or a dormant grey and green painted canvass. There was Brooklyn Masonic Temple. One of the stroll studios was on the third floor of this intimidating building. We were escorted up in a creaky wooden elevator. The half-moon dial marking where the elevator had reached wasn’t working on the ground floor, but was on the third where we disembarked. We were pointed left to Katie Elevitch's studio. She was sitting on a stool in the middle of a morass of chaotic paintings, guitar in hand, mane of red hair hanging over her face and accompanied on the piano by a skinny suited man with a handlebar moustache. We had little choice but to take up her offer to sit on a springy sofa and be entertained with a song involving a mattress, a catamaran, and, when the lyrics dwindled, a rendition of the yoga chant om mani padme hum.
We wound up in Bati, a new Ethiopian restaurant on Fulton Street. There we feasted on meat stews slopped up un-dextrously in springy bread, washed down with white wine.
Soon after I moved into 211 West 109th Street I emerged from the shower one morning to see my red wool dress spread out on the bed. I was convinced I hadn’t laid it out there. It was summer and there was no way I was planning to wear it. I was less disconcerted than I might have been. I hung it back up and told myself some female ghost had been checking out my wardrobe. There were no more surprises like that in the apartment though I did sometimes have a feeling I wasn’t alone.
After I moved back downtown, I got an email from the new occupant JA. He mentioned money I was owed back from Time Warner then added, “I found out about this grisly thing that took place here on the fifth floor of 211 W109th in 1992”, and provided this link to a news story about two murdered girls. There are only two apartments on the fifth floor that face onto the fire escape where the super climbed up and discovered the bodies, so there was a 50% chance the murders happened in my apartment and that therefore, of course, it was one of those two girls who had laid my red dress out on my bed.
A few weeks later, another email from JA: "After more internet searches I found out that the grisly murder took place in flat 5A [mine was 5B], so hopefully the ghosts will stay on that side of the wall”.
In a ridiculously privileged way I'm running the risk of cultural saturation (not that dangerous a risk). Last night went at the last minute to see David Hare performing his Berlin / Wall - wow, would whitter further were I not having to head into work. And a few weeks ago saw Jeremy Irons in Impressionism. Am I subconsciously hankering for British accents?
