Sunset, Wednesday, 22 July 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Walking through a dense passage in the woods today, basically a long-overgrown jeep trail, almost everything a variation on green, plus sun and shade making two versions of each green, and having to keep my head down to get under or around all the young trees, I looked up and was startled by a blazing red sort of star resting on some bending branches of ironwood, just below eye level.

My very initial reaction, even though this thing was not magenta or orange, was, why would someone have tied a plastic property marker here of all places? In property terms, this was the middle of nowhere, almost but not quite by the river (north fork of the Rivanna) – maybe 50 yards shy of it.

Anyway, that was a fraction of a fraction of a second. The star was a fallen leaf of a Virginia creeper vine, already turned blazing scarlet with just a little residual green in a couple of places, a hint of red violet behind the scarlet, and missing one of its five long leaves. The young death of the leaf, its still supple shine, made the red that much more brilliant.

So, on further consideration, and because it was so completely different from everything else around it, the star on the ironwood looked like an asterisk, put there in the most attention-getting possible way. It looked even more like an asterisk than an asterisk normally does, because, with its color, it was literally so exceptional.

What would the footnote say, to which this asterisk referred. I figured with its autumn fire in high summer the creeper was indicating something about time.

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I hope I don’t get wound up here in strained comparisons or become guilty of attempted poetry, but I couldn’t help thinking too about the sun. The ultimate bullet.

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In trying to check against my identification of the ironwood (or hophornbeam) tree – leaves nearly like a beech but the young bark not pale, more steely gray – I had to settle for the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Trees. It’s helpful, but I was looking everywhere for one of my favorite discoveries, what I consider the best single tree identification source for this part of the world, Tree Finder: A Manual for the Identification of Trees By Their Leaves, by May Watts. One of the great pleasures of this book is its amazingly rigorous system, which allows for the differentiation of almost every eastern tree in a little pocket-sized guide – hardly bigger than a pamphlet – for $3.95.

Sunset, Tuesday, 21 July 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

If you could raise a flag each morning of the sunrise, you’d have a visible standard not of your nationality but of the day you’re living.

‘I claim this day in the name of ... today.’

Sunset, Monday, 20 July 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Gray as the moon’s surface on a black-and-white TV.

Gray as silver reflections from a spacesuit.

Gray as a monumental statement missing just one little one-letter word.

Gray as the dark shadow of the white or golden or orange beam of a waxing or waning moon on any night of any year of any era.

Gray made of blues, violets, ochres, reds, yellows, browns, like the secretive and powerful gray government of a great democracy.

Gray as green trees shrouded in rain.

Gray as the black body of a camera.

Gray as the gray plastic or shiny aluminum computer casing.

Gray as letters on the screen.

Gray and bright and white as light.

Sunset, Sunday, 19 July 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Adapted from Walden, by Thoreau:

I have no doubt that some of you who read this are unable to pay for all the dinners you have actually eaten and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour.

Guess that goes for quite a few of us.

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My first real foray into my richest blackberry-picking grounds today was pretty discouraging. (While looking for blackberries, very narrowly missed stepping on some ... evidence of our local black bears.) (Sorry!) (Yes, a bear does, in the woods.)

Three factors, concerning the blackberries. The most important would be the assiduous tree- and brush-clearing carried out this winter and early spring by an outfit under contract to the Rappahannock Electric Cooperative. I would like to have seen their manual or their instructions, because I got the impression that if their directive was to cut, say, every tree within 30 feet from the power lines, they liked cutting so much they decided, aw heck, let’s cut another five feet ... or why not another 10. And that included everything clear down to the ground. The third or least important factor seems to be the natural up and down cycles of different shrubs and vines in the margins of the woods. In between, at number 2 like Tom Watson, is the dismayingly conscientious job of field cutting done by the landlord’s freelance crew – the very same guys who killed me in a justifiable homicide back on June 24th. Even though I know they know their employer will never bother to go through the fields and check up on their work, they give it everything. These fellows make Yanqui myths about the Latin work ethic look really stupid.

Update on Sunday, July 19, 2009 at 09:35PM by BVD

My feeling is that Thoreau sometimes doesn’t reach modern readers – and maybe this was also true for his contemporary readers – because some of his most powerful thoughts are either a bit screened or diffused in context. Sometimes little moralistic preachments or ornate curlicues distract. I had read the thought cited above three times before I really saw it.

Here’s the original paragraph:

Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another’s brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, to-morrow, and dying to-day, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offenses; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility, or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.

Not that I presume to know how it could have been done, exactly, but I would like to think that a gently edited Walden could have outsold Emerson, back in the day.

Sunset, Saturday, 18 July 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

The sun going down on a mostly clear summer day, a dark green atmosphere starting to form underneath the great oaks – darker for the brightness of the sunset – puts me in mind of the evening trees and green lawns of West Egg, in the spaces between Nick Carraway’s cottage and Gatsby’s mansion. Pretty funny, considering I’m standing in a yard that hasn’t been mowed in a few weeks, looking past a garden waist-high with weeds, and the nearest party is likely to consist of a few drunken yahoos screaming and tossing bottles out by the county road. But thanks, Scott Fitzgerald, for creating this part of the world for me, this atmosphere under the trees.

Sunset, Friday, 17 July 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

There was a confusion of thunderstorms on the horizon – at least two framing the view – and the mountains were obscured. I had thought of saving the following for another time, but then I wanted something more suitable specifically for sunset, not just for my current Albemarle County location. The following lines meant a great deal to me growing up.

From Walt Whitman, Song of Myself.

And I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is,
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud,
And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,
And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe,
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.