A couple of years ago I became captivated by the monochromatic possibilities of wintertime. What would happen if I meditated solely on the blankness of a snow-covered hill? How long could I keep this up before I craved differences? Would my observational skills sharpen with my hunger? This happened to be one of those years when the snow stretched well into the lenten season and so I was thinking too of different ways to deny ourselves our usual fare.
I tried to write a poem to express these potentialities.
Monet looked day after day
at the same haystacks,
the same lilies,
the same children,
blooms which changed incrementally.
Where I live it is cold now,
grassless, flowerless,
the variation in things is great,
but the number of things is small.
Snowdrift, black branch of the cherry tree,
frost spreading on the window all colorless
blossoms, lessons in light.
Winter is my teacher,
narrowing the band of experience
so as to see what is there, no mass
of color only white, white
as bare reality.
My senses fast,
each desire sober-minded
toned and tuned to this
strange lenten meal,
simplified, straight,
brought down to zero,
ice crystals and steam for breakfast.
What I found though was that whenever I tried to reproduce this supposed “bare reality” — whether in pastel, words, or otherwise — the scene always ended up having more dimension, texture and vitality than I intended. Where I meant to find nothing, there was always something. Wherever I thought there would be Void, details tended to fill up the landscape. I peered out the front window to see if the frozen cluster of seeds on the lilac had been whisked away overnight by the wind, but no, it remained —
in all of its spare thingness,
not a speck amiss,
and it is I who cannot bring myself
quite yet to contemplate
what is really there,
rather than what might be.
I have a different question now: was this a fool’s errand? It seemed noble at the time to try to restrict myself to what really was and not what might be. But I wonder now that such minimalism would be possible in this world so very full to the brim. So, give me Gerard Manley Hopkins for my money, with his rich vision for even exhausted earth worn bare by man’s feet —
And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs — Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Thoughtful reflection. I particularly savor this - "Where I meant to find nothing, there was always something..." - for it says to me that we are brushing up against some sweet and lovely reality held almost imperceptibly within the folds of our known experience.
I think both the poem and the pastel well worth their weight in effort as they stand alone but together with the observation about how you find so much "added" by your traffick into the white the sum really packs a punch. Everything we do that lets imagination and memory move over the face of whatever deep we hover over increases the Word of it. I think it may be what we are here for. Genesis one shorthands it as "naming". If the poem were mine, I would be happy as it is but would maybe also push a revision to see if you can grab a bit more of that experience of "addition"...or is it revealing? Just two cents from peanut gallery.