Sunset, Monday, 6 July 2009

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

“What a difference a day makes.”

This line, which came to me of course because of the change from yesterday, made me think of my dad, because he used to sing the song all the time. More precisely, he’d always sing the first two lines –

What a difference a day makes
Twenty-four little hours

– and that’s all. This of course left me in some doubt as to whether the difference a day made was good or bad. Little did I know that the difference:

Brought the sun and the flowers
Where there used to be rain.

I might attribute this truncation to some sadness in Dad’s life, of which there was plenty, except many songs went on beyond their initial lines to spell out a sad tale, and he didn’t go on with those, either. For example, of “Blues in the Night” (Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer), what I always heard was:

My mama done told me
When I was in knee pants
My mama done told me, ‘Son ... ’

Really, it was 40 years before I found out what it was his mama done told him.

All I ever knew of W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” was:

I hate to see that evening sun go down.

And he sang that line literally hundreds of times, just out of nowhere. I think I even remember my mother singing that line, and she hardly sang at all.

(The most wonderful song along these thematic lines – my #1 diurnal tune – is “Rising Sun” by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.)

The difference a day makes is one facet of painting these sunsets – but I’m thinking that the difference it doesn’t make is at least an equally large and the more subtle part of the matter. What I notice when I see all the days arrayed is both change and the constant – something in time that doesn’t change.

This thought in turn makes me wish I could have paid more attention to both math and physics – and specifically to mathematical constants – evidently numbers that arise naturally, such as pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter (well, yes, I know you knew this, but I’d totally forgotten) – and to physical constants, like gravitation or the speed of light.

I never thought any of that was very interesting, or relevant to what I was interested in. Now I think there’s a Constant embedded in the succession of days.

Sunset, Monday, 1 June 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.I hope this sky is sufficiently bigger than life to suit my dad, Theodore (Ted) Van Doren, who would have been 83 today. I’d been thinking about lines from the hymn “The Holy City” that I still (more than 29 years after his death) would like to put on his gravestone. (What’s on there now is not of interest, much like the story behind it.) Dad used to sing that song, along with his sister May at the piano, and his powerful voice would shake the walls. But he never could quite entirely get the highest note at the end ... witnessing him do the song was like watching someone try to break the world record in the pole vault. I think he’d appreciate the fact that one of the sites where I found the lyrics also carries an ad, “How To Sing High Notes.”

The best place I found for the lyrics was a site related to James Joyce, which also lets you play a pretty good rendition of one of the verses; this site also includes a discussion of Joyce’s use of the song. The version I found that most conveys the power of the song as Dad sang it was on YouTube, by the Beirut Orpheus Choir. Of course, the performance by Mahalia Jackson is in a class by itself.

Sampling different recordings of the song just about destroyed me.

The lines?

Methought the voice of angels

From heaven in answer rang.

The Green Barn (17 May 1984)

Breathing in and out the bird’s song
I sat on the wooden step
Four miles below the sun
Within the mown fields
Of middle May.

Breathing in and out the bird itself as he was singing
I sat on the sun-warped step
Exchanging atmospheres
With middle May
And acres of grass.

I am he who sits in middle May, deciding
To write.

On the fourth anniversary exactly
Of my father’s death
A heart attack at fifty-three
I now thirty-five begin again
Knowing that we never cease.

I of course remember the day
At age fifteen
I set out to paint on canvasboard the local barn,
The green barn
Newly painted
In the orchard hills.

The apple trees were years removed
Shoulders of earth showed hollows and curves
And waves of grass I climbed to meet,
Breasting them with canvasboard.

I tried to paint that green barn.
I used a palette knife.
The greens I made seemed repulsive to me – they were for the green fields, the green of the barn would be impossible without the right green of the flowing fields –
I painted in a sweat
I felt in despair the flowing fields were falling, slipping, even running away with every stroke,
With sweat, sun, bees, greens, no-good greens and so much desperate humid heat and sweat and sun I walked home,
I walked home, balancing the plastered board over barbed wire and gullies and through honeysuckle and under branches until
In the desolate back yard of Dad’s eternally half-finished patio and half-finished hull of a boat (he’d work on it seven more years before selling it not quite completed),
I scraped it all off.

Never again.

Never.

Never again the scraping doubt.
I wish I had that painting today,
I could make it right.
I could make it fourteen million different ways,
In oil, watercolor, pencil or pastel –

Or, like this:

The green barn,
Once a red barn,
Now a gold barn in the summer light,
A gold barn filled with silver blue,
The green barn painted sunlight green over gold and violet reflections,
Floats in the fire green, the sky green, the hard green, white, yellow and wet flowering and dry green
In the me green, heart green, hands and eyes green or turning green,
In the bird and turtle green,
Red and violet and gold.