5 April 2009 noon

(still watching Simon Schama's Power of Art)(I seriously love it)

JWM Turner had a way with light. Apparently he also had a way with line, though because his lines are fluid and liquid in places and invisible in others, it is not often mentioned. I mention it now. I am still too struck by the works to talk much about them, also my ignorance shows itself to no great harm if I choose to acknowledge it and put a name to it that tells it where to go to change its face.

I am thinking of the people in Turner’s paintings. Of the vast range of the sky and the sea and the atmosphere and ho little of the space is filled with the image of humanity and its suffering or turmoil or death. Of the sense that there is much suffered in the bottom third of the painting that cannot be erased by the ephemeral beauty of the rest of it. I do not pretend to have any knowledge or understanding of the reasons for these compositional choices, but I can tell you very exactly what I feel and think of them. I feel very small and pointless and entirely connected to something that will do as it pleases whether I care or approve or no. It is not a fatalistic naturalism, but a pragmatic view of nature – it does not matter whether I exist or not, nature will.

The wind is blowing with a vengeance borne of neglect outside. It brings snow to this warming earth and sends so many of us indoors, where we will be safe and warm and can complain at our leisure about how unfair is the spring and why won’t it just be warm, forgetting just how warm is the summer, how still and wet the August days in the city when the wind has not abandoned us, but brings only strength and destruction and dust, nothing like relief. Nothing like respite. We do spend time looking for the beauty that will be in front of us eventually, say in Eden. I hope the people who seek Eden will find it, and tell their families and their friends and then get on a bunch of boats and planes and cars and trains and move past the gates and enter the garden and leave the rest of this life to me and my own, so that we can struggle as we will, learn and understand and adapt as we will, eat as we will and never again worry that we are surrounded by so much “life sucks” that we forget our manners and start acting inappropriately.

Yesterday the wind was not so full of cold and I walked with a book in my arms and my hair in a whirlwind past the old place and saw the magnolia buds. The flowers this year have been a grand shock. I am not ready for them, I have become accustomed to the gentle browns and grays and how bright the blue of the sky, the colors on the ground are startling and make me catch my breath, but I know that if I do not see, I will miss what is loveliest in this town – watching it change and remain the same no matter the season or day. This storm that sits over the Midlands and the Plains seems to have some grand purpose, some scheme in mind that requires our absence from its air for a time. We have grown soft in the days past of sunshine and breeze and left-at-home coats. The winter does not toughen us up anymore, rather it makes us fluid, longing creatures filled with hope, easily wounded.

There are leaf buds on a tree that I walk by, though I could not tell you where it grows. The buds have not changed size in a week. I tend to take my cue from them, waiting until the sun finally has its way as it does every year, and only then crawling out to show colors held away so long they are surprised at their own names. This is the wind, the time that kicks up the debris of little urban messes and makes the dust into something solid, with faces and arms and biting tendrils, the edges of leaves never sharper against such tender skin as legs and cheeks and eyeballs.

We command each other to make apologies for this weather as we do for all things unexpected. It is not our right to hold humanity accountable for nature, and yet we do. We forget that the greatest stories happen in a land, on a land, under a sky, on a sea, within a context that we seem to believe we can ignore because it has been explained as so many atoms, particles, light bits and patterns made up of names with definitions not reliant on mystery any longer! We have been freed of superstition! Only to fall victim to narrow minded self-assurance? So we are told. So we tell ourselves. Repeatedly.

I wonder. I wonder how many clichés I can come up with to explain my point of view, to explain how limited is everyone else’s, to justify my constant struggle with absolute hermitude, knowing I cannot be away from an espresso machine for long enough to unpack into my little cave. I wonder what is happening in the world that exists beyond and beneath what we are told about the world. I wonder how much of it does not need the reminder, would not care to share even the bottom third of the canvas, knows that Eden is where the rest of the world lives, and that’s more room for the rest of us.