Six Essays
BLUE
Blue he is, in his sea; so is nature; blue he is, as a sapphire, in his extreme
distance; so is nature; blue he is, in the misty shadows and hollows – John Ruskin
THE BLUE WE SEE in the Madonna’s
robes, in the wings of Cimabue’s angels, in that ultramarine that speaks of
depth in water and the heavens, once all came from the same distant
source. Oltramarino means beyond the seas and once referred to many things:
spices, cloth, glassware. Eventually
ultramarine came to refer to the blue color made by finely grinding a
semi-precious stone. The finest lapis lazuli came from Afghanistan
from a place called Sar-e-sang, the Place of the Stone. When you look at an old
painting luminous with that particular blue, you are looking at jewels and
history and foreign lands.
My
husband, a handsome middle-aged man who still had the air of a renegade, of
someone who might as easily pull away on a Harley as in a Volvo, came home from
Switzerland
wearing ultramarine suede shoes. He’d
been gone half a year, exhibiting in Germany,
in Italy and Switzerland,
those countries that still romanced the airplane and artists who use them as
paintbrushes, as did my husband, making of the sky a canvas. He looked tired and harassed, as do those who
come through customs carrying large portfolios and small crates. Half a year. I waited for the sense of
stranger to creep into my perception.
Those
shoes would not allow me the distance with which I wished to experiment. Half a
year, an ocean, many borders between us, yet those barriers were thin as the
air over our heads. When he saw me and waved, they vanished completely. He is of blue; his preference, his art, his
spirit are made of ground jewels, the color of angel wings, of height and depth.
PRISM
Wherever chiaroscuro enters, colour must lose some of its
brilliancy. There is no shade in a
rainbow, nor in an opal, nor in a piece of mother-of-pearl – John Ruskin
LIGHT CAN BE SLOWED DOWN and made to
reconsider its own path, its desire for velocity. When light passes through glass, it slows and
makes a detour we call refraction. Refraction is matter’s way of saying, “Let’s
rethink this.” Shine light through a
diamond and it slows its speed by almost half because of the density of the crystal. If you lived inside a diamond, you would be
twenty-five when your peers were fifty; you would live twice as long, and twice
as slowly. A water droplet, perhaps the opposite of diamond’s hardness, is also
a prism.
That thanksgiving it was warm and
humid, so after dinner we went outside.
A triple rainbow hung over the forest. A double happens once in a while,
but in the sky that day after the storm three nestled inside each other, and we
looked, knowing we would never see such a thing again. The rarity of it locked
us into silence; we grappled with the event the way medieval people contended
with comets or halos around the moon. Wonder and fear refract our direction,
bend it into new paths. The wonder takes
hold of us and says “I have caught you.” The fear says “I am going to change
you whether you wish it or not. From now on, up will be down, and inside will
be outside.” But wonder cannot
last. Colors fade, especially in a
rainbow.
After matter
emerged from chaos, the first miracle was the creation of light, and with light
came time. When the triple rainbow began
to fade, we came to ourselves slowly and with confusion. We went indoors carrying new desires with us
and I wished I had seen the triple rainbow when I was a child, not a grown up.
I think somehow things would have been different. I cleared the table of our dirtied dishes and
glasses and the vase of yellow garden mums.
SHADOW
Nature is always mysterious and
secret in her use of means; and art is always likest her when it is most
inexplicable. – John Ruskin
FRANCIUM HAS A HALF-LIFE of
twenty-two minutes and a melting point so low this metal would be liquid at
room temperature. It is an element of dream time. At any moment less than
thirty grams of francium exist on earth; it is measured not in cupfuls but in
atoms trapped in laser beams in a magnetic field, floating like snow flakes in
the glow of a street light, casting shadows larger than themselves. We will live our lives without ever seeing
this metal, without experiencing its catastrophically brief existence.
There
was a boy once, like that. By accident, though there may be no such thing, we
sat next to each other in a Boston
pub, listening to revolutionary songs of a different country. He had black hair
and white skin, the coloring you often find in people who recite Yeats from
memory. We drank brown beer and drew codes in the sawdust floor with the toes
of our boots. He was with his friends, I
with mine, yet we knew we were together. His arm slowly curled around my waist,
under my coat, where no one could see it, but I could feel it. We hadn’t spoken a word to each other yet we
belonged to each other. This is not a
true story, you see. It is a story of unstable elements, of rare metals and all
that we cannot see of existence, all that cannot be imitated. It is a story of solitude.
The
door opens. A cold wind blows snowflakes
into the pub, and the codes in the sawdust of the floor are wiped away by the
draft. We shiver and leave behind the dream time. His arm snakes back into its private Eden leaving behind this
memory of a boy and that knowledge of rarity, of immeasurability. The memory lasts longer than the moment and
that is how we know we are, and have been. We measure such moments by atoms of
the unexpected, not cupfuls of what is known. We exist in a single moment
surrounded by before and after.
PURE WHITE
Under the direct yellow light of a
descending sun . . . pure white and pure
blue are both impossible – John Ruskin
WHEN THE SUN DESCENDS, our humanity
is optional; our goodness flees to animal history. Day is not night, and dark is not light.
Twilight obscures, while light illuminates, and under cover we change who we
are. Sunset begins the masked festival of anonymity, when nature overcomes all
the encumbrances of civilization, of education.
Shadows elongate till the children playing on the pebble beach cast
darker outlines of alien origin. White
pebbles turn grey and purple; the wild chicory flowers lose their blue and flee
to burnt lavender. As the children play
outside, inside wives dance into the shadows with other women’s husbands. Frank
Sinatra croons them to the moon.
The
children, enticed by the music, leave the pebbled beach and the fireflies and
creep to the clubhouse windows to spy on this secret interior. The summer-hot world is divided into two
camps, that of children and that of grown ups, and both camps on this summer
evening are reverting to wildness, to those disremembered spaces formed in
early history around campfires, inside caves.
Music and stories make the night bearable. The grown ups fox trot and whisper. Outside, the children press sticky faces to
mosquito stained windows as lightning flashes in the distance.
The teenagers who are just learning the ritual
of courting dances and hormone bravado splash into the water to play daredevil:
the lightning invades the sky, banging and flashing overhead, ambushing the
lake. The last child to leave the water,
just before the lightning hits it for the first time, is the hero of the
evening. The younger children,
impressed, resort to punching and pinching each other till the very youngest
cries. But no adult comes running. They are fox trotting and two stepping and
whispering on their way to a private moon.
PURPLE
. . . . the angels’ wings burn with
transparent crimson and purple and amber.
John Ruskin
IN JAPAN, PURPLE IS A SACRED COLOR, the color of victory, the color of the cloth
used to wrap sacred objects. The author
of the 8th century The Tale of Genji called herself Lady Murasaki –
Lady Purple. In the west the Victorians
chose subdued purple as a color of mourning. Perhaps death and victory are the
same thing.
In
my grandmother’s bedroom a black shawl embroidered with purple pansies hung
over her ogee mirror. She loved purple
flowers above all other colors, and filled the house with vases of lilacs in
the spring. The aroma of lilac still brings me back to that mysterious bedroom
I was allowed to visit only once, the bedroom of a woman who had outlived
generations and some of her own children. The furniture was heavy and dark
wood, their veneers crackled with age.
When my grandmother began to die they
carried her down from that room and placed her in a hospital bed set up in what
had been the dining room. I was eight, and the process of leaving life
terrified me. We sat in a row of chairs, watching and waiting, hours and days
of watching and waiting, and I thought of that mysterious room upstairs, the
room now emptied of its greatest secret.
She seemed willing to go, not at all afraid. Or perhaps after so many years
of being mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, she had learned to hide the
fear from little ones.
After
she died and even the hospital bed was emptied of her, the house filled with
the scent of lilacs. This happened in
March, before the lilacs bloom. In the
Mass card that commemorates her death, angels kneel over a tomb and their wings
are white with purple at the tips.
BLACK
It is at first better, and finally,
more pleasing, for human minds to contemplate things as they are, than as they
are not. – John
Ruskin
WHAT IS MOST UNKNOWN in our world is
the ocean. How do we contemplate the unseeable, that heavy and murky darkness,
the weight and depth of those alien environments? The deepest part of the Pacific Ocean, the part never measured, barely imagined,
is the Mariana Trench, seven miles below seagulls and boats, six miles below
the depth to which submarines dive, four miles deeper than the watery grave of
the Titanic. It is a stratum of ocean
completely unknown to us, a womb where life must survive pitch blackness, salt,
near-freezing temperature and a pressure of eight tons per square inch. But there is life there. Life is.
In
a spring and summer twilight, color, before it mutes and darkens, glows
brighter as the defiant sun grasps for more time. Is this our central metaphor, more time,
please? Time and life use the same verb: they pass. They are wasted or well used, celebrated or
mourned. Grief glows brighter at
twilight, when memory invades. Memory
illuminates the shadows and varies the color of all other emotions. Every day at twilight my elderly father told
the same story. Something about the pure white light of a Florida sunset reminded him of a day sixty
years before, when he and other boy soldiers clambered over the sides of a boat
and stormed a beach in the South Pacific.
There were so many bodies we stepped on them, he said each time. We
couldn’t see the sand.
Otherwise,
my father, as mysterious to me as the deepest part of the ocean, never spoke of
the three years he spent on Saipan except once
when we were watching one of those John Wayne World War II hero movies. My father said: It wasn’t like that.
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JEANNE MACKIN is the author of seven novels and has published short fiction and creative nonfiction in journals and periodicals including American Letters and Commentary and SNReview. She was the recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society and is an award-winning journalist. She has taught English at Ithaca College and creative writing in the MFA Program at Goddard Collage in Vermont and Port Townsend, Washington.
Jeanne Mackin's latest book A Lady of Good Family, the story of the early landscape architect Beatrix Farrand and her relationship with her niece Edith Wharton is available online at this link: http://www.amazon.com/Lady-Good-Family-Novelebook/dp/B00OQRL57U/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=1-1&qid=1433293389
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