Sunset, Sunday, 20 September 2009

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

This is what they call ‘Mostly Cloudy’.

Sometimes I wonder what Thoreau would have done, or how he might have done, if he’d been in the position of issuing blog postings every day from Walden Pond. I mean, wouldn’t there have been quite a few days when he would have been unable to think of anything more to say than “Jesus, it’s cold!” or “Harvested 3 bu. beans ... swam across pond ... listened to bullfrogs”? 

Henry David strikes me as the deliberative sort, probably not the easiest or most fluid of writers. He wrote about half of Walden while he was living at the pond, between 1845 and 1847, but then went through seven drafts before publishing the book in 1854. As you probably know, it was a failure, commercially.

But I do wonder also if it might not have helped Thoreau to have the kind of daily imperative to communicate that many of us feel today. Thoreau took time to distill and compress, and in a sense elevate, his experiences into the book so many have come to know. But he also said, after Walden was published:

Is not the poet bound to write his own biography? Is there any other work for him but a good journal? We do not wish to know how his imaginary hero, but how he, the actual hero, lived from day to day.

I am happy to know that Thoreau could write this even as he was sitting in a house filled with unsold books. But speaking for myself, I know that if I’m a hero, it’s only in my own mind, and so I am strictly my own imaginary hero. And I find that learning how to write a ‘good journal’, and particularly to both write and publish in real time, can be extremely challenging. Those who can do it – hello again, Stephen Fry, Andrew Sullivan, James D. Griffioen, among others – these may be poetic heroes for our time.

Sunset (Twilight), Saturday, 22 August 2009

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

Except for the obligatory excerpt in a high school text, which apparently I didn’t find very interesting at the time, I came to Thoreau late – or perhaps I should be a little more optimistic and say lately – within the last four years. So if I say that painting each day’s sun sometimes seems a little like going out to Walden in instalments, it’s something that wouldn’t have occurred to me at the beginning – or else I might have done it sooner! For me this deep oval of sky, that I visit every day, is very much a sort of pond.

Today at two we had overcast and embedded thunderstorms. The point of view is almost the same as in last night’s sunset painting, just a little farther left, or north.

Pencil, watercolor pencil, chalk pastel and wash, 5 x 7.

Sunset, Sunday, 9 August 2009

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

Following Thoreau, in Walden, I might compare the Blue Ridge to a sort of universal music.

Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it.

That’s the sweet sort of sound I’d noticed, as a child, when we stayed up on the side of Fox Mountain – a filtered music rising from the valley floor and off the opposite massive wall of Pasture Fence Mountain. Now, each night, all sounds between here and the mountains, from Fox Mountain and Pigeon Top to the hum of U.S. 29 a mile away to the birds in the nearby woods, merge into one twilight tone.

L’heure bleue, the Blue Ridge, a blue note.

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.

*     *     *     *

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.

Thoreau: Factitious Cares & Finer Fruits

It amazes me how I can read something five or six times and still not understand, “Hey – wait a minute – that guy is talking about me.” So it has been with this line from Thoreau’s Walden:

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.

Sometimes it’s just the language that keeps me from fully understanding what the author’s really saying – in this case, the ‘plucking’ of fruit just never did it for me. Funny, because I’ve spent portions of several evenings lately following the sunset while thinning fuzzy little peaches from the literally overbearing volunteer peach tree at the back of the back yard.

Plus, the reference to ‘coarse labors,’ by sounding like the farm labor of Thoreau’s day, screened me from the reality that he was talking about a wide range of activities. Today I think they might include quite a few things that we tell ourselves constitute leisure but that are actually forms of running in place. Certainly much of my ‘wasting time on the computer’ falls right into that category.

I believe that when I started going outside to paint the sunset, for me it was a little like going out to Walden Pond on the instalment plan – even if it was another twelve years before I read the book and began to see a connection. As Henry Miller said in his essay on Thoreau, Walden can be anywhere. The deep glacial pond for me has been inverted, in the sky.