Sunset, Saturday, 15 August 2009

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

Some days, topics revolve around each other like fragments in a kaleidoscope. Today it started with wild black cherries and one of my favorite books, Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants by Bradford Angier. Then there was a strange connection, in an odd (even by Wikipedia standards) article on Angier, between him and Stewart Edward White, author of two other favorite books, but books on an utterly different subject –The Betty Book and The Unobstructed Universe. These are books I might, perhaps, find less compelling today, I can’t say, but they had a huge impact when I read them. In fact the connection that cropped up today between Angier and White is exactly the kind of weird thing that was always happening in The Betty Book. 

Then a certain sort of sky comes along and ... for now, the pieces will just have to float.

Sunset, Friday, 14 August 2009

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

D.H. Lawrence:

We must get back into relation, vivid and nourishing relation, to the cosmos and the universe. The way is through daily ritual, and is an affair of the individual and the household, a ritual of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of the kindling fire and pouring water, the ritual of the first breath, and the last.

Sunset, Thursday, 13 August 2009

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

L.A. – Virginia

Mutual of Omaha blinks its superfluous tower light from Wilshire,
I sit writing screenplay in loft looking downtown,
Realize
This isn’t what I really want to do,
I want to be out there,
In all that,
So I promptly end the quest for screenplays,
Walking out into the empty streets,
Walking & walking until I run into something substantial –

It was the Alleghenies.

Sunset, Wednesday, 12 August 2009

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

My brother Michael Addison Van Doren, of Austin, Texas, the most astronomically inclined of all our fanatically meteorologically inclined clan, advises us to check out the Perseids in that “universal palette,” the sky, and make our own “attestation to the heavens.” (Yes, he’s even worse than I am, I believe.) He quotes his fellow University of Virginia–based dreamer and wanderer, Poe, from “Evening Star”:

’Twas noontime of summer,
And mid-time of night ...

My excuse for forgetting the Perseids has been clouds, clouds, clouds. In the woods today with Flint there was full cloud cover and a little rain, so I was surprised for an instant by sunlight over the ground – didn’t make sense. There was the thick brown-gray dead-leaf layer, then green running cedar all over the place. Everywhere in the cedar, little dogwood seedlings had popped up, two or three leaves each, and less than a foot high. Those that probably won’t make it had turned yellow – little groups of dying dogwoods. Pale yellow dogwood sunlight.

Sunset, Tuesday, 11 August 2009

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

Oscar Wilde:

Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament.

Upon the other hand, they go on.