THE VEIL OF LIGHT

The garden is turning brown, the once-taller-than-me tomato plants that were toppled by the hurricanes are ripening the last of their fruit near the ground and the cukes have called it quits; only the shisso is reseeding, and best left alone.

So on mornings like this I get to just stand out here in the prime of the sun and gaze along the light upon the Lake, enjoying the deeper purpose of eyes, savoring the air from the breath of mountains, Lake and distant ocean, an atmosphere rich with all that muse food...

Some old thoughts at once come down unbidden from the mind's attic, about Hiroshige spending artistic time around here centuries ago in pursuit of reality's details, hungry for sights he could capture somehow, get world into woodblock as best he could, and there before my eyes on this autumn morning was that ancient sight, one of the very things I'd first marveled at in those revered pictures.

The Lake on an early autumn morning, glittering with silver in a light-chill breeze, and on the Lake the islands, along the Lake arising the edges of mountains and reeded shores; and there, like the cream of light, somehow settled at the unknown junction between aboveness and belowness, as though each was ever turning into the other behind the mysterious veil of changes, that edgeless layer of vapor the color of washi paper that I'd always thought was an artist's trick to avoid detail, as in the golden clouds that always roil among various key scenes of historic battles on painted screens-- but it was true: that layer really is there at this time of year. Hiroshige must have been here and seen that veil of light on one or more autumn mornings a few centuries ago, and stood there wondering: Could I reproduce that on paper with shades of ink and blocks of wood?

And so he did, in another part of time that is still here.

HIROSHIGE'S
100 Famous Views of Edo

(w fantastic magnifying scrollover)

From the Brooklyn Museum

via the inestimable Plep

EVERY REAL MOMENT

On Sunday took the goodies swimming again, this time across the lake at a secret beach right beyond the famously photographed nanohana garden (in this season full of sunflowers) on the lakeside roadway whence, I suspect, Hiroshige got some of his mountain views for Omi-Hakkei, a view that Basho in his local wanderings no doubt also stopped to admire.

Comfortably heedless of all this history, and of the splendid view, the trio spent their time in the water, with only rare breaks for food or drink, the slanting beams of the westering sun lighting the lake surface to a sparkling blue lain out before the green mountains, the vast paddy slope beside which we live clearly visible as a patch of imperial jade on the tree-dark green of the distant slopes, whose shape Hiroshige captured in his own way; it was less than 200 years ago, that distant human world, a split second to a mountain.

And there in the sun of much the same afternoon were the offspring of that world, three little sisters in their bright bathing suits in the light of the same setting sun, holding hands to make a ring in the gleaming water and singing songs to fill a New Yorker’s hungry heart. With even the slightest real look (real looks is all they have, at that age), they make me realize with a bit of mental lightning what I have known since birth but that often slips my attention: every real moment is beyond price.

Hiroshige
never heard of Goethe
and yet... and yet...