“May Song II.” Four panels in a reclaimed window, 20×25 inches. The text is my somewhat free translation of a portion of Goethe’s poem “Mailied,” and all but one of the flowers depicted are drawn from photos of my front-yard flower meadow (in past years, when it rained).
Rain barrel installed, after two additional (unforeseen but unsurprising) trips to Lowe’s. Now I expect either the eastern piedmont will turn into a temperate rain forest, or it will never rain again and we’ll all wind up as extras in a film version of Ezekiel 37.
Two inches of rain in the past week has Crabtree Creek rushing by at a normal height, but the wetland area by Raleigh Road tells the full story. The stumps in the first photo and the cracked earth in the last should be well under water. We have a long way to go before we’re out of this drought.
The empty coffee cup sits on the park bench. It has had a busy morning, filled with ambition, and now it has found its peace.
Most secular modern and post-modern creatives intuit that the age of naturalism is long since over. But this discovery confronts us with the enormous, gaping hole that yawns, where we’d expect to find a metaphysical framework able to give coherence and moral order to non-naturalistic artworks…. I submit that this is the real sickness in contemporary culture: not the abandonment of naturalism as such, but the widespread (and highly politicised) refusal to allow the reality of any metaphysical substrate able to sustain the artistic depiction of forms, and ends.
In other words: Why are you making what you’re making? Truth has many layers; you don’t have to depict the obvious one. But I will submit that if you don’t begin by studying the obvious one, you will never be able to see what lies behind it. You may have your ideas of it, but you won’t be able to see it.
This week’s work
Recently I heard someone say that such-and-such a farm had “buffalo and other iconic animals.” What other animals are iconic? What animals are not iconic? Is there a chart somewhere I can reference? Are the non-iconic animals insulted?
Made oatmeal-potato datschkuche for breakfast and it is the best thing I’ve ever eaten this week. You can have the recipe receipt if you can read my handwriting. See William Woys Weaver’s Dutch Treats for the original.
I am continually experimenting with my garden space, but here is one thing that works year after year: I run jute twine through steel fenceposts for a crude trellis, tie up and spread out the plants with the same twine, and in fall compost the whole mess, leaving the posts for next year.
“Coffee in a can” must be one of the saddest phrases in the English language.