Too dark, too cold.
It’s only November and already, too dark too cold. You’d think we, or I, would learn to adapt eventually. But we don’t, or I don’t, and remain perennially irritated and amazed by the weather. I suppose this keeps the snow shoveling to come more enjoyable, if it remains a kind of surprise each year.
I am useless about time. I don’t have a very good sense of time, my internal clock is broken, my watches run slow and then die. One is in the process of dying now. I don’t seem to care. Perhaps it is the depressive’s sense of futility or resignation—the work will have to get done eventually and I will be working another weekend, so why hurry? Why worry? It does matter in cooking, and for collecting children from school, and for those things I pay attention. The world functions on time clocks independent of mine; people have their own schedules and they synchronize with mine briefly or do not, and I seem to keep floating on, trying to get done the things on the list that have been there since it was warm. Someone always wants something else done, now, on their time. I can imagine unhooking from this carousel, flipping the clasp on the leash and slipping free of time.
Not really, of course. There will always be seasons, and I will always count days if not hours.
The light in fall changes as the angle of the earth’s rotation alters, a different emphasis of light by color. Everything seems redder, even here; in St. Louis it was as if everything had been encased in amber (or beer, perhaps) so warm was the light. As I sifted through old photographs I was amazed by how really red they were, soaked in the hue of bricks, and remembered those chilly afternoons of rosy light, the aesthetic shock of a Bingham sky flying overhead. I thought those painters were making it up, following a convention, the way Mark Tansey does, though Tansey uses the conventions to subvert them. Thinking of Tansey and Bingham while gazing upon a riverside sunset, I realized I was trapped by post-modernism. I could no longer see the world as it is (if that were ever possible), and no longer see the world as it has been imagined for me, but saw it instead and presume that it is already several steps removed from simply being, and is now interpreted, re-interpreted, and parodied. The sense of wonder and joy is easy to lose, especially when mediating visual experiences through previous visual references. It’s a tricky hall of mirrors and images.
The funny thing was, seeing the river and knowing the Bingham (from an 8×10 color transparency we’d ordered for an illustration in the historical society’s magazine), I got excited. Finding out that Bingham was painting what he saw, and that what he saw was sublime, was transporting. It was not necessarily authentic. If my experience of the sunset on the river was made more enjoyable by understanding that Bingham’s vision was true, it does not mean that assuming Bingham’s vision was pure would make my vision pure. It would only mean that in my specific time and place, near a place that he saw, we experienced, saw, similar skies and colors, and presumably found joy in those scenes. We probably ought not to assume that Bingham felt joy on seeing and painting those skies, but it is hard to imagine that an artist could create paintings that caused joy in the viewer and not feel some joy himself. One hopes that even the academic forms transmit some truth about the artist’s passion and vision; one hopes to find an echo of humanity in the material.
Whether or not Bingham found joy in those Missouri skies, I did, and I miss their openness and warmth. In Providence, even though light is bluer, there are still pockets and surprises of red. Outside an office window, a tree turns salmon with feathery ochre fronds; in the front yard, carmine leaves shake from the slender trees and in the back, the neighbor’s Japanese maple hangs its scarlet head over the fence.
From the window of the ugliest kitchen in Providence, the tree is dull red in the morning when I make lunches; in the mid-afternoon, sunlight filters through the leaves in a palette of reds and oranges and yellows that curve over the dull brown fence, flashing the colors that painters get only with the expensive heavy metal paints. I love the tree, even as the leaves fall and curl and I know that winter will come. Animal that I am, I forget each year, and each year find the joy again in seeing the reds.






