Bin Gregory Productions

Ailanthus: a poem

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AILANTHUS

Please take a moment and think about the Ailanthus.

No-one plans it.
No-one plants it.
No-one waters,
Or prunes,
Or sprays it,
Or gives it plant food or weed killer or even manure.
It squeezes between tall buildings,
Through sidewalk gratings,
And cracks in concrete,
And in angles of fences where mowers can’t reach it.

It survives
Unassisted, and thrives.
It stands up to road salt,
And car fumes,
And dog piss,
And the hardened indifference of big-city life.
Only let it be:
And it will sink deep roots,
And form stout branches,
And cast a shade as good as that of any planted tree.

The Ailanthus is all unwanted children
And the adults they become.
It’s those who got adopted
And those who never did.
It’s those who learn their origins
And those who never will.

It’s the kids who glut the System
And call it Home:
In orphanages,
In nurseries,
And in foster homes,
Waiting for chance to graft them onto someone’s family tree.

The Ailanthus,
Laughing at rejection,
Sings out:
“I was born a bastard,
What’s your excuse?”,
Then turns its leaves to the sun,
And grows.

Please take a moment and think about the Ailanthus.

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[“Ailanthus” (C)1996 by Jonathan Marin]
[Reproduced with permission of author]

Catching up

With Esther Rose and Persephone high in the tropical canopy — With Esther Rose and Persephone
High in the tropical canopy

I’ve been neglecting my website of late. Two entries in 2 months? I won’t be winning any blogging awards that way. Well, in fact I did manage to split the win for Macvaysia‘s Best Malaysian Weblog by a Mat Salleh Award. (Mat Salleh?) That could only be because it wouldn’t be fair for the more deserving Jordan, being the organizer, to nominate himself. Thanks Jordan! Speaking of awards, Alt.Muslim ran a series for Muslim webloggers, the Brass Crescent Awards. I see from the list that I have a lot of reading to do: I haven’t ever visited half those nominated. Well, I’ve got excuses for not keeping up with my reading and writing. Dozens really, though most are of the dog ate my keyboard variety. But I’ll put forward my most credible: Did I tell you we’re expecting our fifth child? Yep, yep. Due in June.

I was on vacation, sort of, around the christmas holidays (one of the benefits of living in a multicultural society: we get everybody’s holidays) when two of my three brilliantly gifted sisters came to visit. It was a great trip: we spent three days in KL when they arrived, visiting, among other places, the Petronas Towers and India Street, where we caught a live performance of Malay traditional dance. It was off to Kuching for two weeks after that. The highlight of the trip was a few nights spent at Batang Ai National Park, or at least the hotel on the outskirts of it. We managed to do a little hiking through the jungle amidst all the general loafing about. Here is a shot of the three of us in a tree house high atop a meranti tree. If we had all managed to look straight ahead, we would be staring at the border with Indonesia, visible across the Batang Ai impoundment. It was not a bad little hike, especially for four little ones and my pregnant wife (did I mention we’re expecting number five?).

I still manage to get online, lurking mostly, reading the news. One article caught my eye, about the coming population bust. It’s by Phillip Longman from Foreign Affairs.com. According to him, the globe will never hit the gargantuan population levels that were so widely predicted and that the rate of population growth has already slowed dramatically all around the world. The rate of growth is already so low all across the developed world that the native population is not at replacement levels. The US population grows every year by a number roughly equal to the amount of new immigration. The author appears to be concerned largely because it means that in the future the bulk of the US population will be made up of them-immigrants (more recently arrived mexicans, indians, chinese, etc) instead of the us-immigrants that he would prefer(white-ish migrants from west of the Urals). Never mind the latent racism, I think the possibility of a rapid population decline is probably still not widely accepted, and maybe even crankish, but it’s hard to ignore somebody who supports your worldview so flatteringly:

Does this mean that the future belongs to those who believe they are (or who are in fact) commanded by a higher power to procreate? Based on current trends, the answer appears to be yes….

Those who reject modernity would thus seem to have an evolutionary advantage, whether they are clean-living Mormons or Muslims, or members of emerging sects and national movements that emphasize high birthrates and anti-materialism.

Found via Metafilter

So, uh, totally unrelated to the above, did I mention we’re expecting our fifth child? Yeah. Due in June. You know, I’ve never been particularly good at da’wah (proselytizing), but there’s more than one way to make a new muslim…

The Fortress of Solitude

Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem mentions Ailanthus

Thank you to Michael B. who wrote to say that Ailanthus shows up in the novel “The Fortress of Solitude” by Jonathan Lethem, a novel about growing up white in a black neighborhood in Brooklyn. Until I can track down a copy of the book for an excerpt, I’ll make do with Michael’s words that the author uses Ailanthus as “shorthand for hell”.

The Element of Lavishness

The Element of Lavishness: Letters of William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner, 1938-1978

Maxwell to Warner, March 15, 1940:

I have all but one foot out of the office, but continue to work a little each day on manuscripts, and will for another month and a half, with the mornings free to work out my own salvation. Your last letter couldn’t have pleased me more if it had been printed on Joseph Smith’s golden plates instead of grey stationery. But you must not grow anxious about The New Yorker. I’ve been eating out of Mr. Lobrano’s hand for years, and always with pleasure. I’m sure you have nothing to worry about.

The view you asked about, the view from my window, consists of treetops, ailanthus tree-tops, a courtyard, and a six-story box factory with fire escapes that descend in alternating musical scales, and with windows that I know the way I know my own face. There is also a drain that all the alley cats in the neighborhood pass in and out of, sooner or later. My apartment is cheerful and bright as a birdcage, and seems a good enough place to write in, with no dogs, no friends, no relations, no refugees. Only a straggling pot of ivy to worry over.

I wrote slowly and it may be years before there’s a new book to send you and so I’m shipping under separate cover an old one [They Came Like Swallows]. It was published in England but for some strange reason they put the first line of every chapter in caps, big ones, so that chapters begin: “THE GRASS UNDER THEIR FEET WAS trampled …” I’m sending you the American edition. If you find it hard going don’t chew on it. Life is too short to read books you don’t like.

Eid Mubarak, Selamat Hari Raya

Two, three cat running
Not the same dog running
Two, three day more raya coming
Everything is ready huh??

Pandan Island far-far in the middle
Daik Mountain has three branches
During Ramadhan everybody struggles
So during Syawal don’t spoil the chances

Jump frog jump
Jump high-high
What knowledge u try
Ketupat rendang very delicious

High-high were the sun
Buffalo kid dead in tied
10 finger hamba susunkan
Fault & mistaken harap dimaafkan

A friend forwarded this to me just before raya. It is in the Malay poetical style of pantun; the first couplet establishes the rhythm and strikes an image, often totally unrelated to the second couplet, which delivers the meaning. It reads almost like a direct translation except for the malay in the last couplet, which would be “Your servant holds ten fingers together/ begging forgiveness of faults and mistakes.”

Strange Fruit pt. 6: Rambai & Tampoi

Some of the fruit here in Malaysia are so good I wonder why they are not marketed more in the US. Some of the other fruit though, you understand why. There must be a half dozen fruits here that are very different in shape and size, remarkable to look at. Inside though, there is just a small grape sized fruit that is a little sweet, a little tart, you suck on it for a second and then it’s done. Tampoi is like that.
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Ailanthus in the Underworld

Ailanthus shows up in Don DeLillo’s book Underworld. It is a very bleak chapter, describing two nuns distributing alms in a bombed-out area of the South Bronx filled with abandoned cars, cripples, utter desolation. The landscape and the people who live in it are vividly described through the eyes of the senior nun, Sister Edgar. At one point, Sister Edgar glances out the window of the tenement.

Edgar looked out a window and saw someone moving among the poplars and ailanthus trees in the most overgrown part of the rubbled lots. A girl in a too-big jersey and striped pants grubbing in the underbrush, maybe for something to eat or wear.

She learns that the girl is 12 years old, daughter of a crackhead who has gone missing. She is living on her own in the wreckage. Towards the end of the chapter, Gracie the younger nun tries to catch her, unsuccessfully, losing her when she

ran into the thickest part of the lots and then I was distracted, damn scared actually, because bats, I couldn’t believe it, actual bats – like the only flying mammals on earth?” She made ironic wing motions with her finger. “They came swirling out of a crater filled with red-bag waste. Hospital waste, laboratory waste.”

Shortly before giving chase to the girl, the nuns see a tour bus arrive, called South Bronx Surreal, giving ghetto tours to European tourists.

Gracie went half berserk, sticking her head out of the van and calling, “It’s not surreal. It’s real, it’s real. Your bus is surreal. You’re surreal.”
A monk rode by on a rickety bike. The tourists watched him pedal up the street. They listened to Gracie shout at them. They saw a man come along with battery-run pinwheels he was selling, brightly colored vanes pinned to sticks – an elderly black fellow in a yellow skull-cap. They saw the ailanthus jungle and the smash heap of mortified cars and they looked at the six-story slab of painted angels with streamers rippled above their cherub heads.
Gracie shouting, “Brussels is surreal. Milan is surreal. This is real. The Bronx is real.”

DeLillo describes the landscape of hell, and ailanthus grows there. An ailanthus jungle on abandoned wreckage. What I see would look grey and brittle. You could see partway into it before the stems grew too numerous, not a wall of vegetation but more like a fog. On really polluted ground the trees wouldn’t be thick and large. It wouldn’t be a forest in the sense of a distribution of young, medium and old trees. It would be more like a thicket, grey-white branches reaching straight up, a whole cohort of ailanthus all no more than one, two or three inches diameter, growing so close together you can barely pass through, even though there is no understory, and hardly any lateral branches. You could hide in there, but it wouldn’t give you any protection from the elements on its own. The compound leaflets would be too small to slow the rain or the cold wind. If she was living in there, she would have to cobble together some other shelter from the debris in the area. Maybe box-elder would be growing there too; then she could at least prop her lean-to against something more substantial. It is a landscape so poor it does not provide shelter, it does not provide food, it does not even provide wood for the fire. And it would stink, especially in the summer heat.

About Me (and John Walker Lindh)

When John Walker Lindh’s story first broke, I remember reading about it and thinking, Good Lord, he could be my brother. I put together the chart below as one of my first web projects. It feels dated now somehow. Maybe people don’t even remember who John Walker Lindh is. Here is what I wrote about him at the time [1] [2].
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