for PJ and CJ, May 2014
At midnight I fell through the tree.
I had my reasons. I was street light
and light’s nature is to find its way
moving blankness back, so any eyes
coming home at that recoloured hour
would see me pass straight through,
a beam between knuckled twigs
touching the road around two lovers
stopped at the point of light
falling. It was for them I chose
this time, this place for my descent.
Otherwise, what purpose light?
See also Green Lights.
It happens more often than I intend, that I’m walking out of Oxford down the Abingdon Road near midnight. A friend once called the walk “the most boring in the city”, and I can see what she meant – it’s just a road – but I’d catch the bus if I didn’t enjoy it.
Part of the enjoyment is physical. This is a journey that not only needs no navigation, I don’t even have really to look where I’m going, I know the way so well. So my body very quickly settles into the rhythm of steps. It feels like a smooth-running, well-ordered system, even if (as I frequently am), I’m coming home from the pub. This is one extreme of walking, the opposite of the Pennine Way, Torres de Paine kind, and in its own way it’s very satisfying.
Meanwhile, my mind is free to do as it pleases, and in this context it slips its moorings in the everyday more easily, and enters a peculiar zone of frantic but untroubled activity. My eyes register regular sights – the view from Folly Bridge down the Thames, the window of the uninsulated house where the pigeons ruffle themselves against the window, the great amorphous forms of the lime trees over the fence in one of the playing fields. I tend to put my headphones in and listen to what I can find on the radio, as there’s little else to hear but buses, police cars and taxis passing to my right. It’s best when there’s some complicated dance music. This seems to plug into the visual part of my brain and enormously enhance its intensity. It also fits with the rhythm of the walk.
Suddenly I find myself alive to hundreds of effects of light, and in particular its filtration by the flesh of leaves. If this sounds intoxicated, it should. The effect is more than one of sight; it carries a large emotional charge – a feeling that anything can be achieved or restored.
I don’t plan to try to convey that part of the experience. But I do want to describe the leaves. In winter, the light seems to nest in the bare twigs overhanging the road. Each street lamp has laid its egg in the branches. In spring, the twigs begin to bud and the colour play begins.
Imagine the effect of each lamp in the bare tree as a globe of orange or white light. In the centre is the bulb itself – its brightness eliminates the line of any twig that crosses it. Around each bulb is its aureole, where the light is less intense and twigs emerge.
Each twig has a skin of bark, reflective where the light falls, otherwise black shadow. So the light of the bulb lies at the heart of an intricate net whose threads thicken the further away they are from the light itself.
When the buds come, they spot the black-white structure of the net with points not quite dark. The light goes through them enough to throw a touch of green – just the faintest touch – into the picture, as you might find animal tracks pressed just into the topmost crust of a dried-out path.
As the weeks pass the leaves flush and their edges creep across the face of the light. At first they’re close to transparent, webs of structure. The chlorophyll increases, and the tissues thicken, and the wavelength of the light that passes through them grows. The colour is never pure green, but green-and-orange, green-and-blue depending on the bulb in the streetlamp. Sometimes one of the traffic lights down the road is on red, and this dominates all the other shades.
Each leaf’s colour is affected by that of the leaves around it, with the beams passing through filter on filter and shifting again and again – aspects of light manipulated by the breeze.
The structure and shape of the leaves also has an effect. Hawthorns are strange hands, the veins showing like bones. Sweet chestnuts are gold, but horse chestnut jagged and darker. In the intricacy of the shape and visible struts of a lime leaf, I am reminded of computer images of the Mandelbrot set. As summer comes on, apple and cherry trees become patterned by the first swellings of fruit.
As I write this in mid June, the leaves are fully formed but still fresh, skeins through which light passes easily to interact with the music I hear, the beat of my steps, the smell of the cool air. Time does not disappear, but alters, is measured by seasons as much as hours. I duck under low-hanging branches and instantly look up for the sky, the trees, the patterns. The road stretches ahead of me, not into darkness, but into more light.
Your eyes can pour fields, crowds of sparrows
clattering and turning out of the hedges.
Your marsh can spread behind bedroom doors,
populous with wings, stamens, antennae,
anthers in pools of blooms. I will inhale
all the pollen. Forestier of buttocked hills,
nights of you are musked with animal treads.
Sometimes a deer looks in from the road.
Sometimes a bee rests its flight on the centre
of your tongue. Though I daren’t risk slow-moving
rivers, in leaf-lipped ponds I go adrift,
unfeathered but warm enough in the beams
of cloudlight spread across the rolling
weather of your face. Don’t close your eyes, not yet.
See also Cezanne on the Pennine Way
“his fortitude held and hardened
because he did what he knew.
His forehead like a hurled boule
travelling unpainted space
behind the apple and behind the mountain.”
–“The Artist”, Seamus Heaney
A long time ago my wife and I saw a Matisse in a shop window. We had not long been in London, and every so often we’d explore the commercial art galleries north of Piccadilly – not that we could afford anything, then or now. We just liked looking. The Matisse was behind a curved glass window at the south end of Burlington Arcade, between the rows of buses and the Edwardian-style “bouncers” who guarded the Arcade itself.
It was a female nude, depicted with just nine lines on a paper rectangle. We still refer back to that image as the ideal use of line.
Lines are excellent for drawing the human body, but can work less well in landscapes, where shapes are ill-defined and blur into each other. A suspicion of lines seems to me to be the best approach. I was thinking about this, and having the same trains of thought in two separate places. One was the recent Cezanne exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The other was on the Pennine Way in late spring, when clear views across the valleys kept me standing silent for minutes at a time.
I have a feeling that I see landscapes in a way that Cezanne would have recognised. I’ve always been fascinated by the way in which his patches of colour build and overlay to create depth and distance, and set the gaze on tracks backwards and forwards from the foreground just inside the frame to the distance.
This sense was defined more sharply for me in a talk given by an artist who works with the Institute of Archaeology, Miranda Cresswell. She argues that the way in which Cezanne built up his watercolours was as if he recorded each slight shift in perspective resulting from movements of the viewer’s head in looking up from and down at the paper – or, I silently added, from walking through the landscape. So, for example, the lines in a watercolour of trees run parallel to each other, approximating the shape of the tree. Meanwhile, colour gives substance to the image, defining one trunk or branch from another, and from undergrowth more decisively than the proliferating lines.
Of course, in later life Matisse took Cezanne’s colour emphasis many times further. I’ve also written before about Paul Nash’s use of colour to bear out Cezanne’s comment that painting is not about depicting the landscape itself, but expressing the painter’s feelings.
I’d joined friends for the first two days of the Pennine Way a few weeks before I saw the exhibition. But that sense of landscape perceived through broad swathes of colour and texture, and only a little through lineation, had struck me again and again.
For example, a large part of the first day ran along a ridge before ending in a knee-breakingly steep descent down stones. This was followed by a trudge on stone flags across a wide peat bog. Throughout the trek along the flags they trembled underfoot, as if we walked on the soft flesh of some vast creature – the effect of all the water in the metres of ancient peat underneath. All the time the ridge we had traversed before extended on our right.
I won’t say it wasn’t boring, that flat path. And I can’t say it wasn’t galling apparently to be doubling back on ourselves after the effort we’d put in to get up on the ridge in the first place. We recalled the rocky, fragmented path and plummeting, peat-red streams of the hilltops with considerable affection. But as we crossed the bog the sun came out for the first time that day, and the flanks of the ridge took glancing blows from the light.
Every few steps I looked to my right and saw the hill’s bulk, and the blue-yellow interplay of shadow and light as it curved away from the sun. The sky was touched by some of the yellow. The peat turf at my feet was a deeper shade that paled slightly as my gaze covered the ground between my feet and the distant rocks.
I think I could draw an idea of that ridge, its jags smoothed to indentations against the sky, its sharp dip towards the viewer’s level, and the sweep of land up to its foot. I’d thumb in greens and blues among the yellows. Of course it would not be “accurate”. But it would represent a walker’s summary of a landscape, with change a part of every perception.
The exhibition had two takes on Cezanne’s favourite subject, the Mont Saint-Victoire near Aix-en-Provence. One was a watercolour, the other in oils. In the oil painting the mountain’s purple bulk kept dragging the eye from the orangey band of foreground and across the complex landscape-gestures that made up at least half the picture. In her lecture, Cresswell said that this picture would be far less effective if it weren’t for the red roofs in the middle distance. She’s right, but why?
My memories of looking out from hilltops on the Pennine Way – let’s say, at the end of the first day, on the narrow path that runs round the shoulder of the valley before (another) knee-crunching descent to Torside – might give a kind of answer in landscape terms. It’s hard to take in the view while walking on that path, as one misstep might easily result in an unpleasant acquaintance with the rocky slope below. But to stop frees the eyes to look around.
I remember the valley’s shape, gradually widening down towards the reservoir. I remember the way greens shaded into each other, from a sparse near-yellow to which the eye responded as though prickled by dried stems, to the wet green of “improved” grazing close to the lake. This is good to recall, even exciting when I add in the grey-white sky and almost crystalline green I associate with the stands of trees down and ahead.
The problem is that it’s all a bit hazy, hard to pattern out as a fully formed landscape. It’s only when I add in the great ribs of rock that jutted out of the hillside that my memory feels grounded. These ribs were grey columns mottled by lichen, and with every half-flat surface colonised by grasses and other plants not quite yet in flower.
The rocks for me play the same role as the roofs in Cezanne’s painting. They give the eye (the mind’s eye) a platform from which to look either forward – to the mountain, or into the valley – or straight down – at the yellowy foreground, or the pebbly narrow path. Everything else between the two is made purely of colour.
I stopped once right at the top of one of those rock pillars, and looked down into a crack that ran far along its length. I feel an eerie attraction to such narrow, precipitous spaces.
The other painting is a watercolour. At least, partly a watercolour. Much of the paper is left blank, as though demanding that the viewer fill it in. The colours are much less intense than in the oil, and overlap each other much more clearly. What lines there are are indications of depth and shadow, not shape. The mountain almost floats alone between the observer and the sky. I kept spending time on this picture, trying to burrow into the absences of the white paper, and unearth details of the landscape.
Perhaps that implies that I didn’t like it. Far from it. I preferred it to the oil because whereas the latter seemed to be viewed from a static position, the watercolour was like the landscape as seen as the foot swings and the gaze moves.
At the end of the second day on the Pennine Way, I had to catch a train to be at a friend’s wedding that weekend. We were a long way behind schedule, and I had spotted that the path took us close to the town of Marsden. My companions faced a hair-raising clamber up and down a valley. I had half an hour to get to Marsden station. I got there in 20 minutes, to find that there were problems on the line, and I was facing a long journey south. I settled in the pub by the station, and tried to recall the walk into the town.
I found I had four fixed images. Reservoir water, light and dark, with the hill face rising into the white sky. The broad white path, dust and stones, between the lake wall and the cut-away hill on my right. The roofs on the edge of the town, and bent hawthorns. Marsden High Street, dark high walls with pub signs reaching out.
They are very vivid memories but dismembered from each other. They are quite distinct from the physical strain of that walk – how hot it was, how fast. I don’t think, from what I know of his biography, that Cezanne ever did a walk like that. But he did know how a landscape can be compressed in a glance. He also knew how to transfer that mental image – including its feeling, its temperature – into paint on a flat surface. For me, the experience relies on my feet.
Open Field 