The Subtle Landscape

  Hemingway wrote: “… a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect weedfringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain.  You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there.  But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.”

  What a way to go through life.  If something is beautiful one should simply allow it to be so.  There is beauty all around if you’re open to it – especially if out in nature’s throes.  Your choice. 

  The river flows east and west here, a geographical anomaly with which I’ve never really become comfortable. (I guess it’s probably the reason I always carry a compass.) Rivers flow north to south in this hemisphere, right?

  Anyway, at sunrise, over these particular few days of fall, this orientation of the landscape makes for an incredible display on my drive to work in the morning.  Traveling west along its northern bank, the sun flames up over the horizon behind me and spectacularly engulfs our downtown some distance ahead as the river bends a bit southward – windows cracklingly ablaze and masonry all coppered up.

  Each year, for a moment, I ask myself if it is that time of year, or might there really be a fire?  I’m forced to turn off my radio and concentrate.  Soon, I realize that it’s my bit of autumnal bliss and relax and sometimes even pull over.  As I’ve said above, I’ve always enjoyed pyrotechnics.

  Further along, just before my office, a wooded island blocks view of the river (as long as limbs are leafed).  During these few days, by now several minutes past dawn, its canopy is burst ablaze, flames blowing about wildly, and spreading ever eastward.

  These are events of existential relativity just like rainbows and, uh, the proverbial tree falling in the forest.  You’re not there, they are fundamentally not seen or heard.  The rainbow only occurs in the brain of one with vision and in the right place at the right time.  Similarly, the tree may fall in the forest, but there is no sound if there is no tympanum upon which the sound wave for to fall.

  Shame, crime, sin to miss or dismiss or – more – not to enjoy any such sweet “spot of time”. 

This entry was posted on October 31, 2008 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Literature, nature, Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.