Thoreau: What Did the Sunset Say?

In his beautifully made and thoroughly, thoughtfully edited Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, Jeffrey S. Cramer quotes from a letter Thoreau wrote 10 years after he left his experiment on the pond:

Let me suggest a theme for you: to state to yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for you, – returning to this essay again and again, until you are satisfied that all that was important in your experience, is in it. Give this good reason to yourself for having gone over the mountains, for mankind is ever going over a mountain. Don’t suppose that you can tell it precisely the first dozen times you try, but at ’em again, especially when, after a sufficient pause, you suspect that you are touching the heart or summit of the matter, reiterate your blows there, and account for the mountain to yourself. Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short. It did not take very long to get over the mountain, you thought; but have you got over it indeed? If you have been to the top of Mount Washington, let me ask, what did you find there? We never do much climbing while we are there, but we eat our luncheon, etc., very much as at home. It is after we get home that we really get over the mountain, if ever. What did the mountain say? What did the mountain do?

The purpose of painting so many hundreds or thousands of sunsets is not to be the Cal Ripken of twilight, but to find out what this routine daily experience may say. What is in it. To account for the sunset to myself.

Sunset, Sunday, 24 May 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.Not to worry – I don’t think every sunset requires a metaphor – but a pale blue and white sky beyond the clouds was like glimpsing an underground lake.

Thanks tonight to Russell C. Smith of Seattle, who shared his collage paintings with me and who seems to slightly resemble Roy Orbison. His work can be found on Imagekind.

Sunset, Saturday, 23 May 2009

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

The builders of the night sky are a race who can strike flaming orange sparks off blue-gray ore. They stretch clouds into sheet metal, then drive off west in their steel phaeton followed by fire. Their exhaust makes unbelievable contrails they never see.

Sunset, Friday, 22 May 2009

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

Sunset, Thursday, 21 May 2009

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

Trees and Sunsets (21 May 2009)

It started in the morning when the trees brought me to a standstill out on the dirt road driveway (a “quarter mile of bad road”). Had something to do with what a perfect morning it was – the kind of day that happens here only in April, May and early June, a day when the weather is coming up really warm after a chilly night, the sky is absolutely blue, not a vast polar blue but a more intimate chalky blue that seems almost a substance you can feel, as if the air is part of the sky. The calm, the lack of wind, was another element – in this radiance, there was that intensely busy balance of sounds that people think of as “quiet” in the country, all background, and the foreground open.

It was, in short, such a beautiful morning as to soothe and stop all thought, because what was there to do but just feel and enjoy those moments. Apparently that’s what it takes for me to see the trees in an altered way, in effect to hear them.

Just so you know the following is not a matter of new age ideology – i.e., I don’t walk around believing that I’m tapping into the consciousness of trees because I think that’s a groovy thing to do – I should mention that even though I spend several hours a week walking through the woods, what happened this morning has actually only happened to me consciously once before. That was several years ago on a cold December night, near some of these same trees. What I find interesting about the two events is a broad similarity in the conditions – perfectly warm and clear and in a sense uneventful in May sunlight, and perfectly cold and crisp and uneventful in December moonlight. Both were singular environments, poles or opposing archetypes of quiet clarifying atmospheres poised and balanced. Although they were not blank slates, they could induce one, if you were that way inclined. 

Along the dirt road were mostly large silver maples, and just in from them, as the land slopes away, oaks of all kinds – post oak, black oak, red oak, white oak – three kinds of cedar among the maples and oaks, honey locust saplings, dogwood, white pine, and on and on – and perhaps the moment this experience really started was the moment I switched from noticing the trees in this way (I had just realized the sapling I was looking at was a post oak) to taking in the trees as trees, all of them massed before and above me, somehow both individually and as a group at the same time. Then there was again a long, long moment of fusion that brought me to a speechless, mindless stop.

The essence of the thing is almost beyond words. First of all, I don’t even mean the fusion of me with the trees, although there was something like that. I mean the fusion of the trees. In that moment, I understand something about a sort of communication and consciousness among trees everywhere – and I mean absolutely everywhere – and also, possibly, among trees in different subsets – species and areas. It is something you can feel better in your fingers and toes than you can articulate in your mind ... and maybe somehow that’s the way it is for them. They know something. I venture to say they know a great deal.

And my sense of what trees know eventually connected with a sort of mystery involving the sunset.

To digress – If you write in a poem that trees have consciousness, as I believe Whitman did (couldn’t find the reference), or as Blake or Emerson or Dickinson might as well have done even if they may not have, that apparently may be acceptable. But if you just come out and say, in prose conversation, “Oh yeah, I was communicating with the mind of trees this morning,” well – you tell me. It’s not the kind of thing you mention on your application for grad school.

So, why does a painter who can actually paint all kinds of different things, and a writer who [ditto], go to the trouble of scheduling his day around an event that may not be very convenient and spend time painting a blank blue sky and a faintly gold horizon that is probably fairly identical to two hundred fifty-seven other canvases he already has in his collection?

I don’t yet really quite know the answer. But I did realize that the trees know something about it. Among the things they understand is time, and life on earth. It seemed to me a knowledge they share in their roots, through the ground, and from their boughs, from tree to tree through the atmosphere. There is something they understand, as we say, “root and branch.”

Tonight I felt something of this knowledge coming up from their roots into that blank blue sky. And that, in a sense, the sky really is a blank. That by remaining attentive to these skies, for as long as I may choose to do, I am painting time, and perhaps then something of what time itself means. That I’m participating in an understanding, even when I may not understand.