Firmamentarium

The several small bright morning clouds unite
With the glare of barely blue air
In textured glass unbreakable
And permanent.

Sunset, Wednesday, 24 February 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Sunset, Tuesday, 23 February 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

You know, sometimes a sunset’s just a sunset.

Of course, I have no idea how or when that would be ... just thought I’d give it a try.

Sunset, Monday, 22 February 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Many ages ago (in blog terms – December 9th) I wrote about a word I’d encountered in the Edgar Allan Poe story “Mystification.” The word was uniquity – Poe used it to refer to the quality of being unique, and I had to go back to a 1955 version of The Oxford Universal Dictionary to find it.

In that post, thinking I was pretty cute, I referred to my ‘obliquity’ – believing I was cleverly making up a word.

Last night I began reading the Poe story “The Man That Was Used Up” – when what to my wondering eyes should appear:

They [his eyes] were of a deep hazel, exceedingly large and lustrous; and there was about them, ever and anon, just that amount of interesting obliquity which gives pregnancy to expression.

Well, shoot. Turns out obliquity’s “even more of a word” than uniquity – it’s in current dictionaries, and seems to be used to describe the degree of an oblique angle, in addition (perhaps) to the way I used it. Obliquity – I should have noticed even my spell-check didn’t mind it.

I think in France they call this tragiquité. Well, O.K., maybe not.

Meanwhile, sunset tonight is fog and a lingering cold rain. The dense granular snow and the air seem to be meeting as some sort of middle substance between slowly melting snow and solidifying atmosphere.

Sunset, Sunday, 21 February 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

I’m sitting in a chair by the woodstove with my notebooks and pens, Pi the cat is on the oriental rug in the other half of the living room (it is indeed divided into halves), lying halfway on her right side, head resting on her right front leg, paw outstretched toward me. Flint the foxhound has thrown himself down diagonally across the big pet bed (a dog bed that each of the three cats believes is actually the perfect size for a cat bed) right in front of the woodstove (the closer the better, in his opinion), his head right by my foot. Lily, the blind genius just two months shy of 18, is taking a break from perching on my lap and lies directly behind me in her spot under the little table by a window, her head toward me. They all seem, to my imagination, to be trying to help direct the flow of something or other to me – maybe the foregoing is in fact the whole thing.

The robins hopping (or bobbing) along on the dead oak leaves where the snow has melted, out the windows to my right, I’m not sure they care to be part of this energy grid we’ve got going.

A copy of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, parked in the triangle of struts of a wooden stool that serves as my morning desk (or deskette) – the book’s at an angle toward me complementary to Flint’s, but I can’t say if it’s there to inspire or maybe just intimidate the hell out of me.

Pi’s up on the bench to observe the robins. I think she’s too small to deal with them, but that’s not what she’s thinking.

In the disgracefully little time I spend reading – in the morning at breakfast and in a few minutes at the end of the night – I’ve been reading Proust and Poe, respectively. (Lily just decided to get back up here. Kneecaps, prepare for claws.) Picking up the Proust, I discover I’m at a point where the narrator’s grandmother is trying to encourage in him a steadier, more reasonable temperament, which she believes will bring

more happiness and dignity to life than were ever afforded by cultivation of the opposite tastes, which led the Baudelaires, the Edgar Allan Poes, the Verlaines, and the Rimbauds into sufferings and low esteem, the likes of which my grandmother wished to spare me.

I believe that at any given moment any of us may be justified in wondering whether something or someone is messing with us.

Sunset, Saturday, 20 February 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.