Sunset, Thursday, 19 November 2009

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

Rain pouring down this morning prompted a strange dream sequence of thoughts – or what our friend E. A. Poe might have termed a ‘fancy’ – speculating on what happens to the rain when it falls – if it remembers in some way, in any sense at all, how it fell, and its life in the sky, as it sinks into the ground or runs off in streams, earthbound – if the rain ever knows any sense of returning when it rises as vapor, burned up by the sun, pulled up into clouds – if the same generations of rain ever return to form the same clouds, if only for an instant, if only as a sport. And if I could perhaps catch them at it.

Although I don’t believe visual evidence is needed for any painting, I did see bands of blue and violet tonight, as afterimages of a pervasive gray. Still raining at sunset.