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The Artist’s
Almanac
September 2008
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The great source of pleasure is variety…
Uniformity must tire at last, though it be uniformity of
excellence.
We love to expect; and when expectation is disappointed or
gratified
We want to be again expecting
- Samuel Johnson
Been there; done that. – A
dismissal of experience as history, which we have reduced to a
one-hour slide show you will enjoy when you come to dinner at our
house.
Now the real excitement lies
in anticipation of our next trip. Within that golden sphere of
promise lies Rome, the Nile, China, Yosemite or Sonoma. And which
of us does not beguile himself with thoughts of a trip to Florida
next winter or imagine the cool mountains of North Carolina or
Colorado during the drought of August?
Then our flight is cancelled, our
baggage lost and the hotel reservations desk does not remember us.
There is a late party in the room next door and we awake haggard
to find our first day of desert golf cancelled by a cold downpour.
Yet it is within the storehouse of promise that our treasures lie,
and its pass key is variety.
The desk bound office worker looks
forward to the coffee break, lunch, the weekend and the vacation.
She doesn’t have to go far to enjoy it. Tennessee has plenty of
variety. With cool mountains, big cities, wild rivers, fish and
wildlife, we have the finest of state parks and camping. Trout
fishing, golf, museums, parks, music, sports, entertainment,
dining – we are surfeited with pleasures.
September promises change. The
subtle shift of color sets each tree apart from its neighbor and
slanting sunlight makes each of them stand forth in splendor not
seen in green ranks wearing the same uniform. Yellowing pears
signal their ripening and the pecan tree will soon shower us with
its first crop. Early leaf fall opens blue horizons, adding
dimension and refreshing our imaginations. To the artist, every
change of light is a change of scene.
Honeysweet Pears
Change comes, whether we seek it or
not. The older we grow the more we notice change, not all of it
welcomed. In an electronic age we can gorge on it, with twelve
simultaneous television news broadcasts. I turn to nature and
quiet landscapes for relief, but even there there is change -
sometimes violent, relentless and cruel. Three straight years of
drought can cost a farmer the homeplace.
Nubbins – Bill Puryear, Photographer
Change now seems headed the wrong
way. As dictators and tyrants control more and more of the world’s
energy supply and our national debt falls into the hands of
unfriendly nations, our central bankers appear befuddled by events
they themselves set into motion. Fuel prices rise as our
children’s test scores fall, we fight faraway wars, the nation is
deeply divided and a political revolution impends. We have had two
killer tornados here in three years and on the third anniversary
of Katrina, another hurricane hits New Orleans, our country’s most
important supply route and the center of our domestic energy
production and refining. It is as though the needles of all
compasses are drawn by the same malevolent magnet; the earth’s
rotation feels reversed.
Will Barrett, the conflicted hero of
Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman is returning home from a
failed career as an Engineer in New York. As he drives through the
fragrant twilight of the Mississippi low county surrounded by
kudzu and luxuriant plenty he tries to sort out his tangled life.
He resolves to leave the Delta and flee to the arid high deserts
of New Mexico. There, the harsh contrast to the desert light and
dry arroyos could not be more stark, and he finds in aridness the
purity that clears his head. This, Percy calls a rotation.
Deprivation, too, is alteration.
Our psyches are not sufficiently
evolved to handle the processing of such swarms of crises. The
nonstop news presented to us in parallel views by television is a
hot new thing in our world. We experience disasters of others
empathetically. This variety may relieve our ennui but the anxiety
quotient of these alarms is unknown but real. Their perfect
antidote is beauty.
We are not responsible for the
management of this our world, as tyrants imagine themselves to be,
nor can we alter it with our anxiety. We, like children, may
experience the surprises, joys and sorrows life offers us in never
ending variety. We, like them, are at play in the fields of the
Lord, in the golden orb of September.
Fountains – Bill Puryear,
Photographer
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