snowdonia

silk road or it happened on the way to mulberry street

Although we did not seen much evidence of this native industry during our recent vacation to the Lombardy region (but it is surely there if one seeks it out and knows where to look), Como and its environs produce an astonishing quarter of the worldwide output of silk.

The top manufacturing country is Brazil, climates being similar and the sheltering cliffs, like this one from the Swiss side of Lake Lugano, evoke a feeling of being in the bay of Rio de Janeiro. Italy was a relative late-comer in the silk business, whose broader history spins intrigue and is the impetus for some unlikely developments. Though robust trade had existed for at least two centuries prior via the Silk Road from the Orient, the material was a costly and mysterious luxury, the process monopolised and kept secret by Chinese exporters.

 Not quite on a mission to save souls, two monks were sent to the Far East, charged by the French monarchy of finding out the secret and bringing back to Europe, in the mid fifteenth century, in what may be the earliest example of industrial espionage. Having learnt the process, the monks smuggled seeds of the mulberry tree and eggs of caterpillars in diplomatic pouches, messenger tubes of bamboo. Mulberry leaves were the exclusive diet of silk-worms, the juvenile form of the moth Bombyx mori who spin cocoons out of silk.

It's sad and unfair that these little hopeful caterpillars are boiled alive in the middle of their metamorphosis in order to harvest their weave and warp, but having mastered the cultivation and working the material, places like Lyon soon became very rich and influential for having broken the cartel. Without the zealous explosion in mills, producing ever more intricate and automated patterns, the industrial and modern computing may have never happened—the looms emerging as something programmable and Turing-complete with cards, instructions for producing designs. The rest of Europe was not content to let the French have all the profits and glory, however, and others learnt the process, including the former Italian and Venetian middle-men in the original and established trade process, sore at having their business suffer.
Prussia's Frederick the Great, whose alchemists are also credited with making the first china, porcelain, outside of China, wanted in on the game too and ordered the cultivation of mulberry trees (Maulbeerbäume) all over Germany—this is why the mulberry is not an exotic plant these days, as fodder for the little caterpillars. This legacy still exists today, and German silk-making, in the interim led to a successful early manned-flight by a certain tinkerer and aviator in Bavaria named Gustave Weißkopf, pre-dating more famous pioneers, with wings made of silk taut on a bamboo frame, intensive war-time production of parachutes for Fallschirmjäger, and a textile export for the DDR that was in demand and a source of pride. What an interesting chain of events the cocoons of a little bug, that is still an ugly duckling afterwards, brings together.

macarthur park is melting in the dark

Though those genuine articles of engagement and dependent reform may be elusive still, but it is a note-worthy development that the media churns, possibly with a certain chomping at the bit to break the sorrowful or revolutionary, with the elaborated entrenchment at Taksım Square and Gezi Park in Istanbul—and any other surprise walk-on cameo waiting in the wings, seems a bit of a trade-off.
The sustained attention is a positive outcome, but in for a penny, in for a pound, it seems a bit of a poor volley to inspire sudden changes of heart and arm-chair relativism and acutely detracting from the message.   Originating as a human barricade to protect the city's green-spaces from commercial development and growing from there, the government did not entertain dialogue or negotiation but suppressed the outcry, rather, with violence.  It's OK to admit ignorance as to the developing situation in Turkey, with the the hope that information will be unmediated and forth-coming, without prospecting and with pressured demure.

re-flagging or from blueberry hill to bath in the meadows

I was disappointed to learn that after years of digging in her heels, credulous with disbelief and subject to politics and planning that were not exactly rooted in reason that I missed the official ceremony that was the city of Heidelberg's final relenting—held literally just around the corner.

The transfer of authority signaled the end after some sixty eight years the hosting of the headquarters of the American Army in Europe passing on to the fair city of Wiesbaden. The colours for the historic V Corps, a tenant unit, were cased, and it was a bit like rethinking tradition and memory, however antiquated, same-otherwise and as a practical exercise. I have plenty of nice recollections from Heidelberg as well, as many others come forward. A lot could be be said regarding the decision, set in motion quite some time ago but without real momentum or the garnering of an abundance of enthusiasm—as with past rounds of base closures that seemed arbitrary and even counter-productive—including the choice for the location of the event.
The parade-grounds were not on the air field in Wiesbaden, were the headquarters are being built, but rather the venue chosen was the palatial gardens of Schloss Biebrich on the Rhine. I think that the decision for the setting was more than just aesthetic—with no viable location on base, due to on going construction and severe over-crowding and a sanctioned protest rally planned for the same day by the post's German neighbours to complain about the worsening noise from night-time training flights. I am sorry that I only found out about this occasion too late to see it in person and hope that there were not too many inauspicious omens for the exchange and we will see what the transformation brings in the next few years.

old head waters run dry or cry me a river

Tragically a lot of people along the flood plains of the Danube, Elbe, Rhine and the Main are being made to contemplate the unimaginable—starting over and with nothing salvageable. Not comparable to over concurrent outrages, still it seems we were all unwitting accomplices, lulled into thinking that rivers would be contained with concrete and dams, shored up in response to a disaster in 2002, and policies that enabled sloppy, muddy footprints from everyone of us, as contributors.

I cannot imagine what these people are going through—though the images of disaster porn are becoming more vicarious (and shared experiences too). I cannot image what it is like to have lost all ones tangible possession and be faced with the prospects, through misadventure, of starting over, due to a grave engineering miscalculation. Closer to home, we had our share of tense moments too, watched with wringing hands and window-dressing, but these close calls, however mounting and threatening in the imagination-affording dark of night, were never destructive and seemed to stem from a natural string of consequences, unrelenting rains coupled with a premature thaw and so on. But our unbridled stream quickly blushed back to its banks. Rage, although relative, is not an honest attribute, expressed not without concert and competition, and like the suffering and nervous sandbagging, the run-away abuse and consumption is also something for which we are all co-conspirators.

through the looking-glass

Though there is no other side of the coin, no deflecting of blame that makes trawling the internet in the name of security any more dolphin-friendly or excusable behaviour, but perhaps early-adopters of new technologies might exercise more caution and general-users might want to give less weight to convenience, banking on-line or ordering from shops on the internet or over-sharing.
 After all, it seems that a Handy is a tracking-device, a transponder (and not a black-box) that happens to include something called a “Calling - App,” and so forth. Smart phones can summarily out fox us. Although corporations have tried to quash freedom and utility on the world wide web, no monopoly or cartel—or legal codex, has been able to keep in stride with innovation and re-invention. Should the newest gadget or platform, however, be regarded with the healthy suspicion that they are merely casings for bugs and spy cameras, maybe America will realise that its policies and diplomacy have consequences, inward and outward.