December 20, Siesta

This morning I woke up with with more purpose than usual. I felt I had the energy to drive myself to the clinic.  On the way to town, we marveled at a rainbow which formed a circle, interrupted by white layers of cloud, around the raising sun.

I met my new family doctor who is a happy talker and whose name contains the word hope. In Spanish. For a reason that I cannot know yet, I felt good about this change. He is a Filipino born and raised in Winnipeg, and looks just like a Japanese sumo wrestler. 

For the last few days I have been more tired than usual. Years ago a friend gave me, as a present, a book called De la fatigue. A philosophical approach, on which I am forced to reflect every day lately. There is something uncanny about how this state has become my most pressing symptom and concern. Somewhat akin to idleness, if I understand correctly how the latter works. One formulates all kinds of projects in one's mind, and they may be of the most exciting nature: write a blog, why not start writing a book for that matter? Order some Christmas presents on line, why not go to the mall and buy them yourself, after careful consideration? Finish that painting which has been waiting for a few months now, why not actually arrange the new atelier that you have decided to set on the second floor? Practice the piano, why not print the fifty page Schubert partition waiting to be measured? Set the Christmas decorations, and so on. The list is unending. And yet, nothing can be done, or should I say, so little as to be almost nothing. As soon as I have practiced the piano for twenty minutes, or laid out the colors, my eyes are asking to close. I need to rest, and that means, sleep. A day without sleep will only add more need of sleep to the next.

In order to offer some amusement to our friend who visited last week, we went to see Aida at the Met, which, thanks to modern technology, is accessible at a theater near you. I thought I would give a try to an activity I used to enjoy before my illness. The theater seats are extremely comfortable, much more so than those of an opera house, and the public, in keeping with a dying form of culture, white haired and never more than fifty heads at all. These days grey hair allows me to fit in quite well. Colin is the odd one out, even if a bit of a bold spot is quite welcome in such company. I am sorry to report that I slept through most of the performance, and while it was our game, for me to wake Colin up when, at the end of the work day, we used to go to the opera in Toronto, things have changed and it is for him to keep me awake, early Saturday afternoon.

It is a difficult feeling to describe. Nothing really hurts. One is to simply go to rest. Nothing dramatic. And yet, this fatigue gives one the impression that life itself is shrinking. I have always been a great defender of siestas, and we used to practice it gladly in our small family, between myself and my parents. On Sunday afternoons, the only day when we were all at home at the same time, we used to close the door of the apartment with determination, and we would almost have hanged a sign on it, like the surrealists used to, which would have said, "poets at work". The siesta so much more enjoyable when some relative or acquaintance would commit the error of calling during those secret hours. The more they rang, or knocked, rang and knocked and shouted, thinking it impossible for us not to hear, being that we lived in such a small apartment, the more we enjoyed pretending we did not hear, we were not there. We never answered, but rejoiced in that exquisite possibility of claiming sleeping time, of steeling sleeping time from those who busied themselves with uncalled-for visits.

Those days are long gone, as my master Proust would say. Never again will I and my parents hide in our respective bedrooms, pretending we're not at home, in order to steal a siesta against the better judgement of people in need of things to say and do, places to go to. Nowadays nobody calls unannounced, visits are planned months in advance, one simply cannot play Oblomov for the sake of sweet sleep. Maybe this is why I find this manifestation of my illness so difficult to bear. This sleep is not stolen for its gifts, for the afternoon dreams which tell more, and more vividly, than the nighttime ones. This is rather becoming the main condition, and while part of it still retains, to my joy, some of those qualities of the in-between vigil and sleep, the accumulation of too many hours of sleep leads one into more ominous unrest.

Whatever the hour of rest will be for you, now that the holidays are coming down the chimney, we wish you good company and sweet afternoons. May the old year end in good cheer, and the new bring you the joys of sunnier dreams.  



















P.S. Snow came down last night and branches bend heavy, blocking the path. On the highway, we met men hunting for coyotes from their parked truck. The dogs are doing the work and satellite tracking devices show their progression, while Rocky goes mad over this intrusion and unusual fuss.
The air is still with snowflakes. From here where winter has finally arrived we wish you again happy, joyful holidays. May all good coyotes be safe, or land safely onto coyote paradise.

yesterday

today

what's with all that barking?

December 5, Barren trees

“I’ve seen that tree many years earlier and it was a most beautiful oak tree, with its large crown. At that time I did not think to paint it. What is in filling out the space with a splodge of green like others do? What is in Nature separated by large spaces, is compressed into a cramped space and overfills and oversatiates the eye, creating an unfavorable and disquieting effect on the viewer. Yet it was the lightning that came from the ether which achieved this feat of creating the space for me to paint the tree, but ... I finished by only painting the distance.”

These are the painter Caspar David Friederich's words and they refer to the portrait of a tree which, after having been hit by lightening, had lost all its leaves and remained the barren, majestic ruin of its former glory. I used to study this German painter's work many years ago, he occupies an important place in my book on melancholia. Cristi sent me this quotation a few days ago, and I had an experience of shock at the sudden reminder of what I used to enjoy so much and am not able to any longer.

The figure of the barren tree is most appropriate to my present condition, and I take that as a good omen. While on my daily walk this morning, I decided to open a new theme in my photo documents, that of barren trees. Those belonging to fall into winter, most often waiting for the next spring to be revived, but also, sometimes, dead. Upon returning home with a few new takes of such trees, and opening this new file, I went through my last year's photographs and discovered, to my wonder, that I have tens and tens of such subjects. It seems I have been interested in lonely barren trees all along.

     

Just like Friedrich remarks, the barren tree allows for space to become evident. Whether the painter achieves his purpose, of painting this space, between branches for instance, and their volume in space, is of lesser importance. He did succeed in seizing the distance between the tree and himself. Otherwise put, maybe, the loneliness of the painter himself, face to face with the tree which we always perceive as lonely when it is barren.

When I had just moved in this house and had just begun our walks along the trail, I used to pass every day by a wonderful old tree, so old and long dead that it had lost all its bark and appeared naked beyond remedy. I had also recently learned that dead trees are most useful for many such critters like the woodpecker, and should not all be taken down. Our own land is filled with dead trees, and they will certainly remain there until returned in decay to the ground. Yet this old, naked tree, I learned to greet every day as I passed by like you greet a neighbor you know from afar but do not talk to. In the absolute solitude of my walks, He reassured me. Until, one day, new owners moved in, and shortly after the old trunk disappeared. I was inexplicably saddened. But what should I have expected for Him?

Not long ago we decided to replace the carpet in so many rooms of the house with hardwood floors. The choice of wood was a most interesting matter. Colin likes pine, and I, for some reason, like the ash, if only for its beautiful name. There was another pretty name in the draw, hickory. We finally decided for both pine and ash, and the work will start next week. It is an opportunity to turn yet again the house upside down, get rid of many things which should have been discarded, yet have found a hiding place and go unnoticed here. For a few nights, between sleep and wakefulness, I wondered what this enterprise was about. It is a wonderful thing, to be sure, to lay wooden floors in the rooms, and let that smell of the Forest take hold of the house. It is also a good thing to imagine that those many ash trees, killed by the ash beetle, will find a new, if artificial life, under Rocky and Alice's clicky and wishy paws. The good neighbor who will do the work assured me that the wood comes from the woods around here, and I took it as the sign of another, lesser known, attachment to the immediately surrounding landscape.

I have said, at the beginning of this note, that the barren tree was a figure of what the painter needs, to understand, or seize, true distance. That which is Barren, in Friedrich's sense, lets the space breathe in between the branches, lets the wind fashion, little by little, nakedness, to the point where it becomes sculpture. That which lets the sky, the earth show their magnitude. All which without the barren trees remains overwhelming, impossible to grasp.