Dear List,
The label of a jar containing peeled
Brazil-nuts for my Xmas baking showed a lunatic bee
holding a sign: "rich in selenium".
I was reminded of Tim Henderson's query on an
arrant thieving moon in BS, so I wikichecked "selenium" (
for the fun) and "Brazil-nuts"( its a mysterious item in
TRLSK: "all things in
that bedroom seemed to have just jumped back in the nick of time as if caught
unawares, and now were gradually returning my gaze [...] This was particularly
the case with the low, white-robed armchair near the bed; I wondered what it had
stolen. Then by groping in the recesses of its reluctant folds I found something
hard: it turned out to be a Brazil nut, and the armchair again folding its arms
resumed its inscrutable expression.")
A thieving white-robed armchair hiding a Brazil
nut? Why a Brazil nut? ( I'm not in full agreement with Page Stegner's
hypothesis seeing in it an indication of the Portuguese Don Sebastião).
Was VN amused because he knew that what is
called the "nut", in a Brazil nut, is actually only
its fat seed?
Did he ever learn that it was rich in "selenium"
and...does it matter?
It was then that I came across aspecial harmony
or romance in simple non-human things... "Selenium (Greekb
σελήνη selene meaning "Moon") was discovered in 1817 by Jöns Jakob Berzelius who
found the element associated with tellurium (named for the Earth)"; "The
Brazil nut tree's yellow flowers contain very sweet nectar and can only be
pollinated by an insect strong enough to lift the coiled hood on the flower and
with tongues long enough to negotiate the complex coiled flower. The orchids
produce a scent that attracts small male long-tongued orchid bees (Euglossa
spp), as the male bees need that scent to attract females. The large female
long-tongued orchid bee pollinates the Brazil nut tree. Without the orchid, the
bees do not mate, and therefore the lack of bees means the fruit does not get
pollinated."
Would this notion of a complicated interdependence
bt. plant and insect, moon and earth be equally hidden by
Sebastian's furniture? Was it related to Sebastian, his
fateful love and a third enchained element?
So much for TRLSK.
My former and frustrated
investigation in BS had left a
nostalgic sensation of moon and mouring, so I returned to it. No further
clues. Still, two other verbal and poetic
curiosities:
the mobled moon ( wiki:
with the head wrapped up or muffled, as in "She lies laid out in stark
stiffness in that secondbest bed, the mobled queen", James Joyce, Ulysses,
1922. Moble, in French, means "furniture")
a
fingernail moon (GMHopkins' moonrise: "The moon, dwindled and thinned to
the fringe of a finger-nail held to the candle"...? Shade's
parings?)
That's a nice start for Xmas baking!
Jansy