'eclipse was all we could see'

Johann Christian Schoeller, "Sonnenfinsternis, 8. Juli 1842." Wien Museum.

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John Parker Davis, "Looking at the Eclipse (After Winslow Homer)," 1865. Clark Art Institute.

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Ted Meuhling's phases of gilded horn.

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Joseph Cornell, "Portrait of Emily Brontë," 1962. The Hudson River Museum.

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Emily Dickinson archive, Amherst manuscript #256.

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Crescent-shaped shadows on the snow in the mountains in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, caused by a solar eclipse, photographed by Lee Russell in 1940. New York Public Library Digital Collections.

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GIFs from Georges Méliès L'éclipse du soleil en pleine lune (The Eclipse: Courtship of the Sun and Moon) from 1907.

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At one o'clock almost half the sky was blue—two o'clock, and the moon had already bitten a small piece out of the sun's bright edge, still partly obscured by a dimly drifting mass of cloud.

A penetrating chill fell across the land, as if a door had been opened into a long-closed vault. It was a moment of appalling suspense; something was being waited for—the very air was portentous.

The circling sea-gulls disappeared with strange cries. One white butterfly fluttered by vaguely. Then an instantaneous darkness leaped upon the world. Unearthly night enveloped all.

With an indescribable out-flashing at the same instant the corona burst forth in mysterious radiance. But dimly seen through thin cloud, it was nevertheless beautiful beyond description, a celestial flame from some unimaginable heaven. Simultaneously the whole northwestern sky, nearly to the zenith, was flooded with lurid and startlingly brilliant orange, across which drifted clouds slightly darker, like flecks of liquid flame, or huge ejecta from some vast volcanic Hades. The west and southwest gleamed in shining lemon yellow.

Least like a sunset, it was too sombre and terrible. The pale, broken circle of coronal light still glowered on with thrilling peacefulness, while nature held her breath for another stage in this majestic spectacle.

Well might it have been a prelude to the shriveling and disappearance of the whole world—weird to horror, and beautiful to heartbreak, heaven and hell in the same sky.

Absolute silence reigned. No human being spoke. No bird twittered.

Hours might have passed—time was annihilated; and yet when the tiniest globule of sunlight, a drop, a needle-shaft, a pinhole, reappeared, even before it had become the slenderest possible crescent, the fair corona and all color in sky and cloud withdrew, and a natural aspect of stormy twilight returned.

Mabel Loomis Todd, from Corona and Coronet: Being a narrative of the Amherst Eclipse Expedition to Japan, in Mr. James's Schooner-Yacht Coronet, to Observe the Sun's Total Obscuration, 9th August, 1896.

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It sounded as if the streets were running -

And then the streets stood still -

Eclipse was all we could see at the Window

And Awe - was all we could feel -

By and by the boldest stole out of his Covert

To see if Time was there

Nature was in an Opal apron

Mixing fresher Air

Emily Dickinson 

sunday tune: the waterboys - the whole of the moon

 

imaginary outfit: dressing like a rothko painting

Last week, desperate to escape the glum relentless invariable Februarieness of February (though bedecked with hearts, candy, three-day weekends, and friends' birthdays, the shortest month is always the hardest one for me), we hightailed it to Washington, D.C., to catch some mid-Atlantic sun and the Mark Rothko exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. I know it is time to leave town when I start researching yet again just how many days of sun northeastern Ohio gets in a year: a measly 168, and of those, only 66 are truly sunny (and it's been cloudier than usual this year).

We needed color and light, and we got it. Outside, the sun was high and bright, and in the windowless galleries of the NGA's East Building, the Rothkos vibrated with color-generated energy. These were all works on paper—none of the epic canvases—and most of the late works, the shimmering color stacks, were more or less the size of an ordinary window, creating the pleasing illusion of peering into portals framing some other, more intense realm. It was color embodied—not flat, but dimensional, moving and changing as I looked at it—and it was intoxicating; radiant magentas, biting reds, and acidic yellows, pungent deep greens haloed by rich blues that recalled to my mind the lapis brightness of Giotto's starry ceiling. Even the pale works, chalk-like and cloudy, held ghosts of pink and violet. My camera failed to capture any of these colors, and the prints and books in the gift shop did, too.

When I lived in Ireland, the interiors of the apartment I rented were painted egg-yolk yellow. The wood-framed furniture was forest green, with yellow, red, and blue cushions. I was appalled by how garish it all felt, but after a few months, it made a kind of sense. After days and days with no sun, coming home to bright color was unexpectedly soothing, restful even.

While I am not ready to repaint the rooms in my house (yet), I did buy a cashmere sweater that reminded me just a little of the magenta in this painting (which really doesn't read on a screen, sadly), and I am stalking resale sites to build a  different sort of capsule wardrobe for winters to come—a Rothko capsule, to wear when February gets to be too much.

Mark Rothko, "Untitled," 1959.

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Trying to match the colors in this painting was a fun little challenge—these yam-hued silk pants caught my eye, but weren't quite red enough, though I am bookmarking them to watch for sales. And I thought about adding one of these wispy tees as a streak of white, but since this is all pretend, decided to go big with a fancy bag, though the Novella bag by Porto is maybe more my speed—they describe it as big enough to hold a small book, so, sold. And for more immediate hit of color, I ordered a bunch of jelly polishes from Cirque in colors inspired by another painting I love.

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Pictured: J. Crew cropped cashmere sweater in magenta grape / Frame Le Slim Bardot jeans / Harris Wharf London coat / Caron Callahan Alfie flats / Bottega Veneta Pouch clutch / Faris Vero helix and stud / vintage Tiffany Hardware silver ball earrings (new here, though you can turn them up easily on resale sites).

pretty pink things / a billet-doux

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Heart cockles, via the Natural History Museum, London.

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Sam Gilliam, "Blue Edge," 1971, acrylic on canvas, The Baltimore Museum of Art via David Kordansky Gallery.

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A Rudolph Steiner interior in Dornoch, Switzerland. Photo by Deidi von Schaewen, via Commune.

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Victorain shell cameo, ca. 1850, via Sian Harlow Antiques.

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An 1817 "cobweb" valentine, featured in "Victorian Romance: The Art of Cobweb Valentines." The recipient would gently pull the string in the center to reveal a hidden image.

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Nacreous cloud formation, photographed over Kingston Upon Hull, United Kingdom, via The Cloud Appreciation Society.

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Slight unpremeditated Words are borne
By every common Wind into the Air;
Carelessly utter’d, die as soon as born,
And in one instant give both Hope and Fear:
Breathing all Contraries with the same Wind
According to the Caprice of the Mind.

But Billetdoux are constant Witnesses,
Substantial Records to Eternity;
Just Evidences, who the Truth confess,
On which the Lover safely may rely;
They’re serious Thoughts, digested and resolv’d;
And last, when Words are into Clouds devolv’d.

Aphra Behn, "Love's Witness." 

odds and ends / 1.29.2024

Edvard Munch, "Winter Landscape, Thüringen," 1906. Kunstmuseum Bergen.

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Garnet and rose quartz necklaces by Marie-Hélène de Taillac, via Twist.

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Calligraphy by Evan McGraw for The Perfect Nothing Catalog.

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Guglielmo Veronesi, “Perla” chair, ca. 1952. Via Commune Design.

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Calendar watch made in 1650 by Thomas Alcock that indicates "the time of tides (presumably at London bridge), mean solar time, the age of the moon in its monthly cycle, and the day of the month." Alcock lost a similar watch in 1661 and advertised for it in the February 1661 issue of Kingdoms Intelligencer. In the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Child's creamware cup, ca. 1830s, via oldasadam.

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Snow monster (or, how I feel by January's end).

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In interviews collected in the book Starting Point: 1979-1996, Miyazaki referred to a universal “yearning for a lost world” he refused to call nostalgia, since even children experience it. We long not for what we remember, but what we’ve never experienced at all, only sensed beneath reality’s surface.

Alissa Wilkinson, "'The Boy and the Heron' Review: Hayao Miyazaki Has a Question for You." NYT, 11/21/2023.

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We seemed to be developing a brittle incapacity to accept, let alone honor, the tender, tragic feeling that had always lain beneath the ordinary person’s experience of nostalgia. In his once famous essay “Old China,” Charles Lamb located nostalgia in “the hope that youth brings” and which time extinguishes. What we are always most nostalgic for is, in fact, the future, the one we imagined only to see it turn into the past. The actress Helen Hayes used to tell a story of how her young prospective husband poured some peanuts into her hand and said, “I wish they were emeralds.” Years later, when he was actually able to give her a little bag of emeralds, he did so saying, “I wish they were peanuts”—which, with whatever excess of sweetness, about sums it up. Nostalgia is built into us ...

Thomas Mallon, "Nostalgia Isn't what it Used to Be." The New Yorker, 11/20/2023. 

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Raymond Duncan, the brother of Isadora, was always a fervent advocate of classical dress. So fanatical was his belief in the healthfulness of Grecian styles that Duncan had his son walk through Central Park in mid-winter clad only in a short chiton, chlamys, and sandals—an incident for which he was charged with the endangerment of a child.

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I subscribe to Vittles online magazine, because reading evocative writing about food I’m too lazy and incompetent to prepare or seek out is one of my favourite hobbies, and because I always learn something. In a recent edition, I discovered a captivating Korean suffix. “There are no thoughts, just meong, the suffix in Korean used for activities of staring into stillness, like bull meong—staring into the fire,” wrote the author, Songsoo Kim, in a beautiful article with recipes about preparing a feast that I would dearly love to eat, but absolutely will not cook.

As a black belt starer into stillness—it’s my other favourite hobby—this spoke to me deeply. I asked Kim about it and she explained meong (also written mung) is colloquially used to describe zoning out, but without a negative connotation. This, she explained, was 'an organic linguistic development, as more and more people started mentioning how staring at the fire at campsites or fireplaces together is rather healing.' There are also forest, foliage and water versions of quiet, empty staring and cafes where you can 'hit mung.' 'It’s a moment we all need,' Kim said.

Emma Beddington, "Is this the year of meong—a wellbeing trend I can actually master?" The Guardian, 1/22/2024. 

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A turtle staggered from the waves, wearily dug a shallow hole, and commenced to drop her lovely eggs. Amber had no wish to witness this; she could no longer bear to watch struggling nature. She shut her eyes, feeling that the very act of not looking was helping the turtle out in some way.

Joy Williams, "The Beach House." The New Yorker, 1/15/2024.

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I’m not sure that I have the qualifications to give people advice about reasons to live. My daily affective state is one of great despair about the incredible destructive forces at work in this world—not only at the level of climate. What has been going on in the Middle East just adds to this feeling of destructive forces completely out of control. The situation in the world, as far as I can tell, is incredibly bleak. So how do we live with what we know about the climate crisis? Sometimes I think that the meaning of life is to not give up, to keep the resistance going even though the forces stacked against you are overwhelmingly strong. 

Andreas Malm, interviewed by David Marchese in the NYT, 1/16/2024. 

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Mitchell is one of a new breed of biologists who espouse a complex-systems perspective as an antidote to reductionism. He aims to reclaim from the philosophers words like purpose, reason, and meaning, which scientists often avoid as being unquantifiable. He mostly eschews jargon. This is a plainspoken book. It gets mildly technical in matters of biology and neuroscience, but it builds an argument that is methodical and crisp, and it cuts through years of disputation like a knife through cotton candy. This is what you are, Mitchell asserts: “You are the type of thing that can take action, that can make decisions, that can be a causal force in the world: you are an agent.”

If the denial of free will has been an error, it has not been a harmless one. Its message is grim and etiolating. It drains purpose and dignity from our sense of ourselves and, for that matter, of our fellow living creatures. It releases us from responsibility and treats us as passive objects, like billiard balls or falling leaves.

James Glieck, "The Fate of Free Will." The New York Review, 1/18/2024. 

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The “how” is just as important as the “what,” if not more so. It turns out that the how actually is the what—or at least cannot be separated from it. They share one nervous system, and that oneness is what allows style to matter.

David Salle, "Follow the Light." The New York Review, 1/18/2024. 

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Guy Davenport ... credited his critical acumen to a childhood spent treasure hunting. Sundays after church, his dad took him to scour fields throughout the South for arrowheads:

What lives brightest in the memory of these outings is a Thoreauvian feeling of looking at things—earth, plants, rocks, textures, animal tracks, all the secret places of the out-of-doors that seem not ever to have been looked at before, a hidden patch of moss with a Dutchman’s Breeches stoutly in its midst, aromatic stands of rabbit tobacco, beggar’s lice, lizards, the inevitable mute snake, always just leaving as you come upon him, hawks, buzzards, abandoned orchards rich in apples, peaches or plums … The search was the thing, the pleasure of looking … My sense of place, of occasion, even of doing anything at all, was shaped by those afternoons.

That’s vintage Davenport. Effortlessly, unabashedly learned; tender beneath its professorial carapace; vaguely excessive. John Jeremiah Sullivan ... writes, “He once defined ‘despair’ as the sensation that you’ve run out of ideas.” I wonder how that sensation registered to “the man who noticed that ‘in all of Balthus’ one finds no clocks.”

Dan Piepenbring, "New Books." Harpers, January 2024. (Sold me on this.)

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imaginary outfit: convalescing

For the past six weeks, I've been on the mend after having an errant clump of mysterious cells roughly the size and shape of a sweet potato extracted from my midsection. After navigating a season of increasingly unsettling spells of testing and waiting, the definitiveness of surgery was a relief. A plan! Something would be done, something would be known. In the end, I lucked out—an "easy" surgery, with small incisions, that removed the best kind of benign tumor to have. (That pathology report, when it turned up a week or so later, was the most effective painkiller I have experienced.) It was all a physical fluke. 

Surgery is wild, though. One day, I had a regular seven-mile-walk habit and was busy doing all the things, and the next ... I was not. Before surgery, the prospect of recovery sounded relaxing—resting in bed, long slow strolls, nothing to do but read—but it turns out, recovery is its own type of hard work, a shifty dance of pushing forward and easing up, of reclaiming and adapting ordinary tasks and habits. For the first couple of weeks, anything requiring sustained attention was too challenging—my body stole focus and just simply being was absorbing enough. (It was a good moment for crossword puzzles, magazine articles, and short stories.) With time, I'm getting better and better, but I still feel like I am living in two parallel tracks—one in my mind, which holds on to life before surgery as the baseline for how I should be, and the other in my body, which continues to heal in its own inscrutable, nonlinear way. I wonder when this weird awareness will start to fade, when the two lenses click together and simply become ordinary life again. 

Here's to slow but steady steps into the new year. 

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Some things I have found useful since my surgery: THE GREAT wide-legged cropped sweatpant (There is no elastic waist, which means you can tie them to rest gently wherever is most comfortable, and The GREAT's website includes all the measurements for each garment, making it easy to obtain pants of sufficient looseness for post-surgical swelling.) / THE GREAT long-sleeve crop tee  / Inventive Sleep backrest wedge pillow (much more comfortable than a shifting mound of treacherous small cushions) / Serta electric sherpa fleece throw (amazing; nothing else felt as good) / Hydro Flask 40 oz All Around travel tumbler / IKEA Resgods folding bed tray (invaluable) / Sockwell Circulator wool-blend medium compression socks (to switch off/cover hospital-issued TED hose) / Salomon RX slides (comfy, with a nonslip grippy sole). 

Also pictured: The Art of the Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories / Slush Club cup.

Not pictured, but essential: ARQ's generously cut high-rise undies, for avoiding tender incisions, and a Jellycat sun purloined from a kid's bedroom, useful to press against your abdomen while laughing if you, like me, foolishly elect to watch a comedy special the day after you come home. 

silver joy

festive things

Gislebertus, "Dream of the Magi," circa 1120-30 , Cathedral of Saint-Lazare,  Autun, France. Via Stephen Ellcock.

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Mary Delany, "Ilex Aquifolium (Tetandria tetragynia)," from an album (Vol.V, 60); Holly with berries. 1775. Collage of colored papers, with bodycolor and watercolor, on black ink background. The British Museum.

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George Brecht, "A Christmas Play for Joseph Cornell," 1963.

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Olivier Dassault, "Untitled/Christmas card," 1987. MFA Boston.

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Tacuinum Sanitatis, Milan or Pavia, ca. 1390-1400. Via The Fortnight Institute.

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Schreiber pop-up toy theater book, ca.1885. The V & A.

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Katie Marchant/thankyou_ok Christmas cake.

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Holiday dress of my dreams: Rothermal Theater Dress by Bode.

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Star Finial, artist unidentified, United States, 1875–1925, paint and gilding on metal, 45 × 22 × 9 in. American Folk Art Museum.

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1883 Louis Prang silk-fringed Christmas card.

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... [W]e are seeing our own mortality in the close of day and year. The hours of sunlight run by more quickly, and we’re left behind in the darkness. It’s hard now to feel the privation of former winters, or experience the desolation of the landscape; it’s not even likely to snow. But we see the trees unleafing, and sense the different strains of winter light: sometimes bright and cold, often thin and misted. Much of our enjoyment of this gauntness is in relief. Fasting for advent used to make a penitence of nature’s dearth, relieved at last by ecstatic abundance. On Christmas Eve congregations would hang the branches of the churchyard trees with apples. In Moscow, they deck avenues of leafless boughs with red and gold baubles, which has the same effect.

Our contrivance of these spots of colour has its roots in nature’s contingencies: red berries on a black branch, an evergreen tree in a field of snow—Ruskin’s lesser beauties perhaps. But it takes a mind to frame them, to put the tree in a painting or a living room. Sometimes novelty itself seems poetic, as though the product of design. ... We aestheticise the tree by changing its setting, or we admire it through a picture. Christmas itself is a removal, separated from the rest of the year by its spangles and pageantry. The season makes us tourists of our own nostalgia; it’s best not to think too hard about the absurdity of chopping down a tree and covering it with tiny ornaments. What do we do with the wanwood when the new year comes? In the 16th century, after the feast and the dancing, the tree would be ceremonially burned, marking the end of festivities with a final brilliant spectacle, which does seem better than leaving it on the street for the council to collect.

Alicia Sprawls, "Christmas Trees." London Review of Books,  1/5/2017.

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In 1419, the Freiburg bakers’ apprentices noted having seen a tree set up in a hospital, decorated with apples, wafers, gingerbread, and tinsel. In Riga, in 1510, a brotherhood of merchants are said to have set up a tree around Christmastime, then decorated it with thread and straw; they burned it at Lent. Many of the hints of early Christmas-tree—or solstice-tree, or New Year’s tree—traditions come from rules limiting them. A regulation in Upper Alsace specified that each citizen could take from the forest no more than one pine, of a height no more than eight shoes. A 1611 ban against felling trees in the Alsatian town of Turckheim is arguably the first appearance of the term “Christmas tree”: Weihnachtsbaum.

Rivka Galchen, "The Science of Christmas Trees." The New Yorker, 12/6/2022. 

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One thing is for certain—I wouldn’t want to be a Christmas tree. It would be nice to be the center of attention, to be so decorated and lit that people stared at you in wonder, and made a fuss over you, and were mesmerized. That would be nice. But then you’d start dropping your needles and people would become bored with you and say you weren’t looking so good, and then they’d take all your jewelry off, and haul you off to the curb where you would be picked up and crushed and eventually burned. That’s the terrible part. Maybe that’s why so many people today have fake trees. They are quite popular. Their limbs come apart and you can put them in boxes and store them. You can have one of these trees until you die and you can pass them on to your children. They may not be real but when you look at them you can’t tell the difference. That always makes people happy—not being able to tell the difference. And happiness, to want to be happy, is the most natural thing of all.

Mary Ruefle,  "Recollections of My Christmas Tree." Harpers, December 20, 2013. 

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See also: Robert Frost, "Christmas Trees."

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Charles Mingus' secret eggnog recipe.

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Merry everything, friends.