LASTING IMPRESSIONS - 29 October 2011
29th October, 2011
There are some obvious reasons why I many not have written for 5 days: Firstly, our dear friend and 3rd Musketeer, Gianni, arrived from Tuscany on Tuesday to hang with us for 6 days;
Secondly, we unexpectedly received the deadline schedule from our publishers informing us that they needed our edited and final selects of text and images by......1st December! And, that they needed an indicative sampling by Monday in order to begin design work. Whoa! This is a first for us - being asked to submit the finished work when we haven't actually finished gathering the material. And thirdly, finally, the letdown after the sale of the house. I don't mean letdown in a negative sense, but more in the sense of released from tension and debt. It has created an enormous space and maybe that's why I initially felt somewhat resentful to have the expansiveness interrupted by deadlines. But that's life and there are much worse demands.
Nonetheless, it's a challenge now to stay open to what else there is to see in these final days in Provence at the same time that one is going back through the work in order to make important decisions about what stays and what goes. This, combined with cold, wet weather, has given the week a closed-in quality and there have been times when we've felt, oh, done here, let's go home.
Yet as I am writing, images from the last few days keep floating in front of me and there is a sort of insistence to them, as if Provence is saying, hey, you may think you're done with me but I'm not done with you, look at this and this....so I open myself now to these lasting impressions.
Vibrant pops and splashes of orange foliage against a smoke-grey sky; the assortment of reds, browns, yellows and greens of the grape vines..colors and shades as varied as the wines themselves. The extraordinary sunlit canyons of Roussillon, their ochres and oranges stippled with boysenberry, the colors soaked by a day of pouring rain pitting themselves into the retina almost to the point of pain that's how intense it is. And after a few minutes there it feels as if the air itself is saturated with color. We, along with the few off-season tourists are all aglow from the reflection and it reminds me of being in Central Park a few years ago during Christo's Gates installation when all who looked up were lit by its orange glow.
A gorge we drove through a mere 3 days before was then a textured landscape of grey rock and green trees. Now, this same gorge is lit with the whole spectrum of color one associates with a New England fall, and yet here it seems even more remarkable. Not to diminish those vast sweeps of maples on fire, the sight of which takes your breath away. But here, the color seems even more intense because it isn't the entire landscape but, rather, individual trees and bushes standing out against the grey of cliff and sky, as if someone has chosen which of them should be torched.
The epee of Provencal light strikes once again, calling you to attention with its piercing stroke. One can see the call to Impressionism and Pointillism and, for me, Van Gogh is present in the wind, which whips and whorls trees and foliage with twisted energy and garish color.
And then there is the sadness inherent in late autumn made more poignant by the contrast of the color against the slate sky. As if one see the course of one's own life and the urgent need to burn bright even as winter closes in.
