Or the Luminous Metallurgy of Despair
This afternoon the lake is restless lead and the silver sky holds pewter clouds.
The forest is copper and brass.
The horizon is gold leaf burnished bright.
Autumn’s heraldry is or and argent on a field of gules and verdigris.
Days like this drive me into an exquisite ecstacy of desperation and despair.
(Or it would, if the insulin of reason didn’t calm me a little. I get landscape overdose the same way others get caffeine jitters or sugar highs. Now there’s a good subject – the Endocrinology of Enchantment… sorry, where was I? Too much horizon. Forgive me, I’m okay now..)
In the inch above that horizon, by the way, there is a kingdom of clouds, layered, flounced, hazily brooding. Disappointing in a photograph. Impossible to paint.
Speaking of which…
Dante Gabriel Rossetti is said to have exclaimed, when his woodblock supplier sent him blocks slightly shorter than he had ordered, and had the temerity to add that it was only a quarter of an inch after all, « What do you mean ONLY a quarter of an inch !? I can put a whole city in a quarter of an inch ! »
That Rossetti, always the optimist.
The transposing of miles of depth on a flat sheet of paper is an exercise in carefully planned folly. Something only the right side of the brain would take on, doomed as it is to glorious defeat.
This is the reason I reach such heights of exasperation (it doesn’t show; inside my dour, expressionless Protestant exterior is an equally dour expressionless interior) when I see people draw using EVERY reflex that the other side of their brain has learned by rote to write. « Loosen up ! » I holler, don’t hold that pencil like you were taking notes ! It’s a magician’s wand, a sword, a conductor’s baton, not a confounded ballpoint ! ! Do it right now or I’ll swat you one!» Actually I don’t do that at all, I usually take the coward’s way out and say « That’s a lovely drawing. », hoping against all hope that the note I attach to the end of the sentence, like some forlorn hope in a faltering charge, will elicit the raised eyebrow that says « And… ? » But, more often than not it lingers in the air and fades away. Another time…
If anything shows how far we have fallen from the grace all children possess, it’s the two and half million copies of « Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain » that have sold since it was published, witness to the fact that learning to write dismantles the ability to draw. While I’m not suggesting illiteracy is the answer, it seems a more balanced approach between book learning and the arts would make a happier civilization.
The same logic applies to languages. Serious studies have shown that by 10, a child’s brain is losing the flexibility that permits effortless absorption of foreign idioms – precisely the time they are introduced to a second language in most schools. Maybe that’s why they taught us French starting at 14 when I was a kid – to make sure we little British Columbians would NEVER fully understand our Quebec compatriots…
As for me, I’ll see you later. I’m on my way back outside. While I was dilpidating my time in idle musing, everything has changed.The lake is copper now, and the sky is rust.
SITTING UP READING LATE
Somehow I wandered onto amazon.com (« Hello Mr Howe ! Thankyou for logging on to amazon ! Where were you, we’re eager to take more of your money ! ») and wandered back out with my credit card red-hot and smoking. Now the books have started to arrive.
Needless to say, I’m overjoyed.
Some are to replace books I once had. Patrick Leigh Fermor is one of my favourite authors. Ages ago, I gave my copy of « A Time of Gifts » to someone, and left, appropriately so, my well-read copy of « Between the Woods and the Water » somewhere near the ocean on New Zealands’ North Island (likely under a tree, given the title) so getting back on the road to Constantinople is long overdue.
The question of course is will he ever finish the third volume, or will legions of avid hikers-in-the-mind, myself amongst them, be forever and forlornly stranded at the Iron Gates ?
I’ve also found exactly the kind of book I love : « The Alphabet Versus the Goddess » The Conflict Between Word and Image by Leoard Shlain.
I even found another copy of Gunnar Brugge’s indispensable book on Norwegian churches that went astray somewhere between Hobbiton and Edoras, half a decade and half a world away. My “new” copy will be in German, but I only read pictures anyway.
And the Kalevala of course.
And a book on Katmandu.
Next stop : everything by Bruce Chatwin, starting with “In Patagonia”.
Speaking of which, I’ve also ordered EVERY picture book amazon had on Patagonia. (Don’t ask, I’m just trying to help them turn a profit… and besides, I already have everything on Iceland and there wasn’t much on Tasmania or Skellig Michael.)
