By Donald Finkel
But we will take the problem in its most obscure manifestation, and suppose that our spectator is an average Englishman. A trained observer. carefully hidden behind a screen, might notice a dilation in his eyes, even an intake of his breath, perhaps a grunt.
-- Herbert Read, The Meaning of Art
It is because the sea is blue,
Because Fuji is blue, because the bent blue
Men have white faces, like the snow
On Fuji, like the crest of the wave in the sky the color of their
Boats. It is because the air
Is full of writing, because the wave is still: that nothing
Will harm these frail strangers,
That high over Fuji in an earthcolored sky the fingers
Will not fall; and the blue men
Lean on the sea like snow, and the wave like a mountain leans
Against the sky.
In the painter's sea
All fishermen are safe. All anger bends under his unity.
But the innocent bystander, he merely
'Walks round a corner, thinking of nothing': hidden
Behind a screen we hear his cry.
He stands half in and half out of the world; he is the men,
But he cannot see below Fuji
The shore the color of sky; he is the wave, he stretches
His claws against strangers. He is
Not safe, not even from himself. His world is flat.
He fishes a sea full of serpents, he rides his boat
Blindly from wave to wave toward Ararat.
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We had snow on Thursday! Not very much -- Adam saw more than we did on the ground (he sent a photo) -- but we walked home from the park with flurries falling and the eagles complaining in one of the trees. It had been a quiet day beforehand, I had a bunch of cleaning to do and things that needed to be taken care of before the cold snap, like bringing the hummingbird feeders in so the nectar won't freeze.
I had my Thursday night chat on Zoom minus one friend, then we watched the first few episodes of White Collar, which several of my friends told me I needed to watch and they were correct. (I have always loved Matt Bomer but for some reason I thought there were more murders on this show than there actually are.) Variations on "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" by Hokusai and others at SAM in December:
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