Life Itself

 One thing leads to another. How do you get from the Daily Poem in the Paris Review to a re-read of The Loved One and an exploding portable toilet courtesy of Evelyn Waugh?

Here’s the Annmarie Drury poem that caught my attention:

Walking in Hills of Which One Has Seen Many Paintings

Your task differs: to leave
the world to its own particular
fragility: not to turn it to emblems the way

shadows of cows in a pond once
became emblems of the heat
of a summer day. Within borders of your

vision, imperfect frame, the sun
sets, shadows are allowed
to darken away. Others knew this landscape,

but you know there must
always be those who only watch
and, watching, wander off; while quietly,

quietly even the most suggestive
fragility undertakes its own slow
transformation, cedes to its own complexity.

So things are seen on a walk, in life, are the things themselves – not a sign, a symbol, an image, representation or emblem of something else. As the things themselves. Wallace Stevens put it this way; “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself”. 

Is it possible to disconnect what we see from our ideas about what we see and from the things (art for example that have created those meanings and associations? Like the paintings of cows in a pond signaling the heat of summer. It’s every country walk through a cow pasture in summer with the cows seeking shade by a stream or pond, their tails flicking the flies, and the ground slick with cow pats. Careful! Don’t worry about your shoes. Don’t slip!

Drury’s poem ends with the knowledge that others have been here before us. They walked the landscape and saw the sunset and gave it meaning.

Sunset

It was Paul Fussell who put me onto sunsets. In The Great War and Modern Memory, he comments on how the literary tradition of the Romantics and the Victorians had imbued the sunset with meaning and significance,

The experience of living in the trenches of the Western Front and the ritual of stand-to at the beginning and the end of the day established a new awareness of sunrise and sunset.

What one stared at twice daily for years on end, thus, was sunrise and sunset. “We have a unique opportunity of viewing sunrise and sunset in the trenches,” writes Hugh Quigley, “owing to the decree that men must stand-to at daybreak and nightfall.” And if Flanders was flat and wet, it had the distinction of offering terrain and weather productive of superb dawns and dusks. “I have never seen such glorious vistas of sunset or sunrise as in this country,”

It was a cruel reversal that sunrise and sunset, established by over a century of Romantic poetry and painting as the tokens of hope and peace and rural charm, should now be exactly the moments of heightened ritual anxiety. What literate young man could forget, during the hour of stand-to, the sunrises of Blake and Shelley, of Tennyson and Arnold, the sunsets of Wordsworth and Byron and Browning, and even of Sir Henry Newbolt? Those attentive to the history of taste know that sky awareness is a fairly late development. There is little of it, for example, in the eighteenth century, which felt no pressing need for such emblems of infinity as sky or sea.

As we can see from the Nash paintings, sunrise and sunset lend meaning to our perceptions of the scenes. The hopeful optimism of the title (We are Making a New World) is rendered ironic by the scene of utter desolation of a ruined lifeless landscape. The sun is rising on what exactly? The huge red watery sunset contributes melancholy to the Totes Meer (Dead Sea) graveyard of the downed plane. 

In Fussell’s view, the key document in the history of British awareness of the sky is the influential five volumes of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843-1860).

Here Ruskin asserts that hitherto no one has paid sufficient attention to the sky, and that we have thus missed much of what Nature has to tell us for our moral benefit. The effects of the sky, he says, are “intended” by their “Maker and Doer” for our pleasure as well as our moral instruction. The sky speaks universally to the human heart, “soothing it and purifying it from its dross and dust.” And the great exponent of the sky’s moral work is the painter J. M. W. Turner. His renderings of sunrise and sunset are far superior to those of Claude Lorraine, and for Ruskin the painter of such effects is a master artist whose achievements in light and color imitate those of God himself in His most earnest pedagogic moments.

We had some spectacular sunsets when we lived in Duchess County. Here’s one magnificent example from November 2015.

Modem Painters was immensely influential in establishing the visual taste of the Victorians and their successors. Charlotte Bronte wrote of it: “This book seems to give me eyes,” and she was followed by several generations uniquely devoted to observing sunrise and sunset with an almost mystical enthusiasm.

As Fussell notes – the literature of WW1 is stuffed with sunrises and sunsets.

Emphasized as objects of close attention by the daily rituals of stand-to, sanctified as morally meaningful by the long tradition of Ruskin, these sunrises and sunsets, already a staple of prewar Georgian poetry and the literature of the Celtic “Twilight,” move to the very center of English poetry of the Great War. They are its constant atmosphere and its special symbolic method.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

In Flanders fields.

– from In Flanders Fields by John McCrae

A Revolting Sunset

But – things move on. in 1889 Oscar Wilde was already getting sniffy about sunset worship.

Yesterday evening Mrs. Arundel insisted on my going to the window and looking at the glorious sky, as she called it. Of course I had to look at it. She is one of those absurdly pretty Philistines to whom one can deny nothing. .\nd what was it? It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period, with all the painter’s worst faults exaggerated and overemphasized – (The Day of Living).

By 1930 so much had been made of sunrises and sunsets that the sophisticated, cynical, and dyspeptic such as Evelyn Waugh were sick of them. This is from his travel book Labels:

I do not think I shall ever forget the sight of Etna at sunset; the mountain almost invisible in a blur of pastel grey, glowing on the top and then repeat¬ ing its shape, as though reflected, in a wisp of grey smoke, with the whole horizon behind radiant with pink light, fading gently into a grey pastel sky. Nothing I have ever seen in art or Nature was quite so revolting.

Feral Children

And so we arrive at Waugh who wrote some of the most deliciously malicious lines in literature. Waugh is the kind of author whose books would need multiple trigger warnings to protect the modern-day marginalised and vulnerable who might come across them at university.

Take his description of the feral brood of evacuee children in Put Out More Flags