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Areas of Fog. Will Dowd
Читать онлайн.Название Areas of Fog
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isbn 9780997745597
Автор произведения Will Dowd
Издательство Ingram
Shortly before being sold, it was discovered to be a fake. (You can always expect a flurry of forgeries in the wake of an artist’s death.)
There are small details that give it away.
For example, Wyeth painted pine trees by laying down an undercoat of green, then trickling black branches over it—not the reverse, as seen in the fraud.
Also, the forger was too stiff in his brushwork. The shadows are labored; the hillside is stilted; even the signature is too neat. Wyeth, who painted with fingers that ached to be back in his warm pockets, was all speed and dash with his brushes.
No, this winter landscape was not painted by Andrew Wyeth. It was not painted by someone whose hands were cold.
I SPENT THE past two weeks flat on my back—the result of a slipped disc—and, consequently, my contact with the weather has been limited, though I did crawl from room to room each afternoon to lie in puddles of surprisingly warm sunlight like a cat, all the while staring at the ceiling and working fitfully on my living will, which a combination of boredom and the sudden simulacrum of old age spurred me to tackle.
It wasn’t so bad.
Eventually the random swirls on the ceiling assembled into compelling shapes, and of course there’s a quiet joy in planning one’s funeral.
Only last Monday, when I hobbled to the doctor’s office like the Elephant Man, did I directly experience the weather. At three o’clock the sun was already low, impaled on some branches. The sky was a filthy blue, and it was freezing out. My bare knuckles felt as if they were in a vice, though I barely noticed due to the summer lightning of nerve pain in my left leg. Funny how separate pains in the body vie for conscious attention like claimants to a medieval throne.
“Why is this happening?” I asked the nurse practitioner.
“Well,” she said, “your lumbar vertebrae have become compressed and—”
“No, I mean why is this happening to me?”
It’s the existential question that all New Englanders ask themselves in late January. We stand at (or lie beneath) a sunny window, attempting to bask in secondhand warmth, and ask ourselves the question: why is winter happening to me?
Why do I live here?
Voluntarily?
What complex web of self-sabotaging life decisions led me to take up residence at 42° North, a latitude which, if the Northern Hemisphere had a spine, would correspond roughly to the first lumbar vertebrae, the kidney-shaped bone giving me such trouble?
Come to think of it, why is there a winter at all?
Why does the Earth even teeter on its axis?
Why can’t it always be summer?
But these are childish questions. It’s no use arguing with the weather or trying to wish it away. Like a funeral, life goes on. Rain or shine.
THIS WEEK I planned to write about prognostication, a theme suggested (no surprise here) by the punctual reemergence of Punxsutawney Phil, the celebrity rodent who’s been predicting the weather since 1887, though of course it’s not the original Punxsutawney—given the average lifespan of a captive groundhog, Phil has had more incarnations than the Dalai Lama. Then I was going to address the lead-up to Wednesday’s early morning snow bestowal, when dozens of Massachusetts superintendents (a notoriously skeptical order) canceled school before a single flake had fallen. Then I was going to mention the chilling prophecy of my physical therapist (“Snow means shoveling, and shoveling means more business for us”). And then I thought I would discuss the animal tracks I saw Tuesday night (a groundhog’s?) with particular reference to the Dogon medicine men of Mali who divined the future in paw prints left by the desert fox in the sand at night. Finally, I was going to conclude with my own Wednesday morning walk through the superintendent-vindicating snow and how I turned at one point and looked back at the receding trail of my boot prints and wondered what they foretold.
But I don’t want to write about all that. It seems too predictable somehow. Too predetermined.
What I really want to write about are these icicles hanging outside my window—the glittering daggers that would make the perfect murder weapon, if you think about it.
Yet now I have a new problem. Any attempt to describe an icicle sweating in afternoon sun is haunted and taunted by Vladimir Nabokov, who did it better, who did it best:
“I had stopped to watch a family of brilliant icicles drip-dripping from the eaves.… I did not chance to be watching the right icicle when the right drop fell. There was a rhythm, an alternation in the dripping that I found as teasing as a coin trick.”
It’s as if certain features of New England weather are copyrighted by certain writers:
Dickinson has a trademark on that slant of afternoon light.
Frost owns ice-bowed boughs.
And Nabokov has an incontestable claim on melting icicles.
The passage above, by the way, comes from Nabokov’s short story “The Vane Sisters,” in which a French professor in Cambridge, Massachusetts fears he is being haunted, and unconsciously controlled, by the ghosts of two sisters—one a former student, one a former lover.
When the story was rejected by The New Yorker, Nabokov was not pleased.
“I feel that The New Yorker has not understood ‘The Vane Sisters’ at all,” he wrote to the editor. Didn’t she recognize that the first letters of each word in the last paragraph of the story formed an acrostic? “I am really very disappointed that you, such a subtle and loving reader, should not have seen the inner scheme of my story.”
“Subtle and loving”—that’s the kind of reader Nabokov wanted and expected. A reader so enraptured by his prose, so confident in his godlike resourcefulness, so in love with him, in short, that he or she would always be watching the right icicle when the drop fell.
Who needs that kind of love? That level of adoration? I don’t. All I need are these icicles in the window.
Vivid, lucent, antically dripping icicles, menacing iridescent rapiers, yards over us, glinting ominously, towering nobly, oozing tears, hypnotic, imperial, now glowing orange, now melting elegantly.
ACCORDING TO THE news, it’s a war out there.
This week, a blizzard dragged its icy talons up the East Coast, severing power lines and snapping utility poles.
Winter Storm Pax, apparently named by a sardonic Latin scholar working at The Weather Channel, laid siege to Atlanta and entombed Charleston. The news makes it sound like North Carolina died.
When the storm finally reached Massachusetts on Thursday, it just stood there and delivered a long, commanding lecture on the nature of slush.
In Boston, an entire street was shut down when a 6-foot icicle fell three stories and almost harpooned a pedestrian.
It’s possible that, for once, the weathermen aren’t exaggerating: it is a war out there.
Speaking of which, I’ve always thought a decent dissertation