An inrush of arctic air. Crystalline sky, an almost-full moon riding whitely above the mall. Huge purple lenticular clouds, lit from below by the descending sun, like James Blish's huge city-machines, ready to torch up the gravity well and quit the scene:

"What'd you see down there?"

"Not much to see, nope...."

Cars with their headlights on. A honking chorus as a trolley bus executes a slow clattering turn against traffic.

Too cold for photography; I stood on 16th Avenue near twilight, shivering, bare hands red with chill. The iron tang of snow in the air. Words stripped away by the cold. Owen came for lunch; we sat in the bakery just around the corner, observing the sandy March sunlight out on the sidewalk. Recently returned from NYC, Owen described working, for a week, in the same high-walled, light-drenched room as Matisse's The Piano Lesson (1916, above). I don't have the skill to adequately describe this painting: what can you say, really, faced by that green slice at upper left, or the similarly-shaped wedge that scars the young boy's face? Passages of "abstraction" that refuse any definitive phenomenal identification; the compression of a host of feelings into shapes that refuse to be sorted back out into their component parts: into light, into exterior foliage, into floor, into skin. I find myself at a loss for words. Oh, yeah, uh-huh, I dunno...."I was out with the Nikon yesterday." As if this statement could somehow encompass a wider spectrum of emotions, or all the things I saw. A tray of apples red with sunlight through a window. Cloud-shadow on car hoods. A tall African woman in a long quilted jacket, her hands hooked through two heavy white plastic shopping bags. And the soft grey fuzz on the magnolia buds by the hospital.
- posted by cjb @ 6:12 PM