In full air, in broad daylight, in airy spaces, in the intervals between diaphanous shadows, I was wandering through pebble beds planted with sentinel cedars and well-trained Japanese conifers and branching-low horizontal blue-grey shrubs rimmed by round leafy yellow somethings. Better, more clear to know their names, but I only know the shapes and colors. I wanted a theatre that I could fasten into a picture.
Mine has not been an innocent eye. I have an agenda. I’m looking for something. I have the template inside my head and would squeeze my landscape into it were it at all possible. It’s out there somewhere. I’m stalking it.
I need longer days. In the past I found time stretched out broadly, elastic mornings that floated with airy sounds, blended into afternoons spun out, suspended along bands of clear light like threads of a spider’s web.
There’s a patient, waiting creature for you, the spider whose day is an eternity of resolute ambition poised.
There’s more time inside the minutes than I’ve been perceiving of late. My sense of time has weakened perhaps. Get glasses for the eyes, listen more intently for sounds to articulate, but of time’s discernment I’ve lost the requisite careless, idle manner that sees it most minutely. Time has overflowed the banks, and I try to wade back to quiet pools of it, shielded narrows, stilling eddies flattening and reflective, silkening out like a mirror clock into whose depths finally one peers and sees rich darks and the lingering thought. I want time that advances in predictable, rational concentric arcs.
I wanted to empty myself of cares, become literally care-less. An experiment for daylight.
As for my drawing, I thought I might choose the easiest subject. Is that fair? That’s not “cheating,” is it? Is this a test? But what motif would that be, the easy one? This is not an easy test to cheat.
I tell anyone who will listen (that would usually be a smallish group indeed) that fatigue is a good teacher. Learn to play when you are tired, even sometimes when you’re completely beat, for in the times of exhaustion many new possibilities open to which ordinarily we are stiff to refuse. But when sufficiently tired, one is unable to resist. Sometimes one makes noble progress by the virtue of a heavy weariness. As the time ripples out and stills and the glance is available a steady, lasting lingering second.
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