V. (winter 2009 – italicized or quoted text is from the notebooks of leonardo da vinci)

A bird, for a comedy.
        Aren’t really weddings except for Kate’s and Falstaffian coins—that currency makes change & he does say the text here given is of interest for its accompaniment by a sketch. Now these are not simply Italian: Uccello della comedia. You ARE my favorite cook; the rabbit WAS meant for the pot when Alice saw it on the roof.

A dress for the carnival.
       What da Vinci says is To make a beautiful dress cut it in cloth and give it an odoriferous varnish, made of oil of turpentine and of varnish in grain, with a pierced stencil, which must be wetted, that it may not stick to the cloth; and this stencil may be made in a pattern of knots which afterwards may be filled up with black and the ground with white millet. He says (writes) this in Italian. A pretend dress. But the decorative element—the pattern (black & white millet grains glued to the cloth)—would be more material (grains of millet!) than what they are creating the illusion of (the illusion of “knots” “embroidered” on cloth). A carnal dress: you could eat it, the pretty aspect of it. And he says, “Snow taken from the high peaks of mountains might be carried to hot places and let to fall at festivals in open places at summer time.” I didn’t pick apples this year but we gleaned grapes before it got too cold. When apples freeze on the branch you can ski or snowshoe out to them and suck the juice out of the inside of the apple. The apple body keeps the juice most of the winter. Yellow apples are best for this; check with Henry about why. Cole’s Quince, St. Edmund’s Pippin . . . haven’t written the names down, as Z. suggested (A-Z).

There are 3 instructions for setting fires: 2 amount to how to set a room on fire safely—“suddenly you will see the room in a blaze like a flash of lightning, and it will do no harm to anyone.” One paragraph under “Fire” (Fuoco) is more mysterious: “Take away that yellow surface which covers oranges and distill them in an alembic, until the distillation may be said to be perfect.” The implication is that then the orange will be on fire, like the rooms he describes before and after in separate paragraphs. Or was the orange envisioned as a small round room or cosmos and he outside—