Confusing Art With Words

The Abstract Landscape (Workshop)

First a photo. A moment in a particular day when you exclaimed
and clicked your mnemonic device.
The image now resides pixillated and printed,
history devolving to this shot of life already lived.

Now, new instructions. Take the picture and see even less than you remember.
Instead of what journey led you to this view, see only a triangle of hill and rectangle of sky. Tetris them together on a sheet of paper with a line.

Then mix paint in colors you feel like today.
Notice everyone is choosing different hues.
Notice how we cannot bear to copy even the teacher.

Now there are the layers to put down, starting with a light wash,
working into dark writhing shapes of shade,
remembering the goal is to follow a semblance of geometry we stole
from the picture of a place at which we pressed pause. Or is it?

Then, this long afternoon of staring into pigment, trying to make splotches of color meaningful.
Yes, by all means draw a horizon for the eyes to travel toward.
Yes, remember the near is bright and far away is dim, and how amazing
when imagination highlights a place that should be hidden from view.

It was the line of trees when sun broke the fog.
It was a moment when the rising wave thinned and caught the sky.
It was the way a rock in the ocean turns every color before night claims it.
It was the purple space between the green trees.

If there is any message in this method it is that we have been so lazy
naming the color of things. Likewise, we rely on labels to tell us who we are.
Stripped away from context, in a random lovely place,
trying to mutate beauty into beauty,
we are all Van Gogh.

But back to the painting, paper heavy with experiments and disguises.
We labor on the dark pigments, we paddle in watery dazes.
We defiantly define flowers, trees and stones.

But as the day goes on we yearn for that dark horizon of rest,
seemingly reachable across a mirage of land or sea,
color always changing under an uncertain sky.

7/29/08

Camping in the Rain

The rain is a strong mizzle in Lincoln City and my plan is to camp at Devil’s Lake park, right in town, so I’m biding my time in a Thai restaurant, hoping to wait out the precipitation. I order food and a beer, but it is difficult to eat the fiery hot food slowly so I am ready to leave, leftovers in hand, in less than an hour.

It’s hard to stick to the camping resolution with motels all around, but I am here to investigate ecobiography at Sitka and I feel I should try and enter the ecology of place for this exercise. So I go to the campground and check in and find my space which is soggy and ringed with skunk cabbage. I walk around to locate the bathrooms, and pass a man taking the ritual campground stroll, protected against the elements in full hunting cammo gear.

“When’s this rain going to end?” I ask.
“I heard it will be nice by Saturday,” he says grinning.
“I can’t wait that long!” I whine.

I go back to my car and sit and listen to the radio and play tunes on my recorder, just the same as if I was home. The windows fog up and it keeps raining. The campground is only about two-thirds full, but this weekend is Fourth of July and I know there will be no vacancy by Friday night. I wonder why camping is so attractive even as my neighbors all huddle in their campers, tents or yurts, far more cramped than in their own homes. We do not like to interact with nature when it is wet. All our fantasies of outdoor involve sunshine and dry ground, even on the coast where both are rare.

I go ahead and put up the tent, committing myself finally to this insistence on matching words to deeds. I decide to set up on the asphalt driveway, figuring that will be my best bet to stay dry. I can’t stake the tent corners but I can stake the guy lines into the dirt and even tie one directly to the grill of the car. By the time I get the tent up the rain has stopped, though the trees still drip into the puddles. So I walk out to the docks that poke into Devils Lake. The clouds are barely off the water, but the air is mild. Leaves are unburdening themselves of heavy drops of rain and springing back with little rustlings, and a robin, head and feet dark with wet feathers, hunts a last bit of dinner at the lake edge. Two pairs of fishermen head towards me, poles and beer in hand, ready to enjoy the last hour of daylight. One of them is the guy in cammo.

“Hey, it stopped raining!” he says, recognizing me.

I smile and agree, and go back to my site, readying for what will be a long night, punctuated by loud showers of furious raindrops on the fly. But I am dry and snug in modern inventions, slightly more connected to the real world than I would be in town, but a long way from the exuberant shine of skunk cabbage, succulent in the mud.

The next day the rain eventually stops, as we talk uncertainly about how to write where we are. We venture out to the Salmon River estuary where high tide is pushing ocean up river, salt and fresh mingling irrevocably. Sparrows in the blooming blackberries call insistently to each other, a green teasel is sharpening leaf into summer thorn, and a seagull lands beak first in pursuit of a piece of swimming food. Every part of the scene depends on another. We sit down and survey each item of landscape, writing ourselves into the story of right now, from a history of other places, hoping to find a niche of tomorrow.