Issue #6 - Sunrise, Moonset
Ground Rules…
I apologize. I’m six issues in, and I’ve already broken my own rules for this newsletter. Originally, I said I’d review writers/artists local to the Texas Panhandle, and include pencil sketches. Then I switched to ball point pen almost immediately, and I’ve written about James Joyce. This week isn’t any better.
I realized a few issues ago that I needed to lay down some ground rules for how I criticize artists and authors here. The role of a critic is to provide context for a reader to better understand a story. The Lubbock music critic Tom Mooney raises the same point for Texas country songs.
We often talk about how when a songwriter understands the lay of the land and the people who live there, it enhances their writing.
— Thomas D. Mooney (@_NewSlang) April 15, 2020
But how important is that the other way around? It’s obviously not required, but how much does it benefit the listener?
There has to be some work of education on the part of the reader/listener/viewer of art to raise expectations. The higher an audience’s expectations and demands are for art, the better the art a community can produce. And it is my sincere hope that the better stories a community can tell about itself, the better the people will be for it.
The question is: “What is better?”
Sunrise, Moonset
About nine years ago, I took a job teaching at a town about 45 miles outside of Amarillo. The halfway point of the commute is marked by a microwave tower which sits topographically at the highest point in a 50-mile radius. Topping the hill at 70 mph on a clear day, I can see nearly everything I could drive to in an hour. It is broad and flat, rimmed with mesas and caprock, cut through with a creekbed that warrants a bridge but no water. Trees that exist are drought tolerant juniper and mesquite, or remnants of elms that lived years ago when their roots could reach groundwater.
I have seen the landscape under all lights and weather. Throughout the fall semester, I witness the daily, minute, incremental, southward creep of the sunrise along the eastern horizon, until it falls off completely after the autumn equinox, leaving me in the dark until the unnatural time change in November, then making the creep again until the solstice when it reverses course. In the nine-month academic year, my 50-mile view will sometimes be foreshortened by dust-storms, blizzards, and grassfires, each a marker for changing seasons in the Panhandle. Because of my speed, this view lasts for a few seconds each day.
Several times each year, the full moon will linger into the sunrise and from my momentary vantage, the entire world I know is held between those two poles. It always feels like a gift, like something I should acknowledge, but school starts at eight and I’m only halfway to work.
That image always draws to mind a scene in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Several mercenaries move through the old west desert on a murderous rampage. They’ve camped for the night in what has become an unmarked cemetery.
> They did not know that they were set forth in that company in the place of three men slain in the desert…The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning. >
“Worlds past all reckoning.”
McCarthy has fashioned himself as a modern day Virgil. Not the historical Virgil of Rome, but Dante’s guide through hell and purgatory. With a scientist’s acuity, he describes the empirical world to the edges of what we can know with our senses, and then he stops. Virgil turns back at the dawn of Paradise as a world beyond the reckoning of human wisdom. Does it exist? Who knows? This is one way to perceive and record the world.
Marilynne Robinson, perhaps the only living American author who could set her head against Cormac’s, has a similar scene in Gilead. She flips the image though. This time a father and son are wandering through drought-stricken Kansas, hunting the lost grave of a grandfather. They’ve found the cemetery barely marked. They kneel down to pray at sunset.
>Every prayer seemed long to me at that age, and I was truly bone tired. I tried to keep my eyes closed, but after a while I had to look around a little. And this is something I remember very well. At first I thought I saw the sun setting in the east; I knew where east was, because the sun was just over the horizon when we got there that morning. Then I realized that what I saw was a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them. I wanted my father to see it, but I knew I’d have to startle him out of his prayer, and I wanted to do it the best way, so I took his hand and kissed it. And then I said, “Look at the moon.” And he did. We just stood there until the sun was down and the moon was up. They seemed to float on the horizon for quite a long time, I suppose because they were both so bright you couldn’t get a clear look at them. And that grave, and my father and I, were exactly between them, which seemed amazing to me at the time, since I hadn’t given much thought to the nature of the horizon.
My father said, “I would never have thought this place could be beautiful. I’m glad to know that.”
Wonderful Light Between Them
McCarthy’s sun and moon “terminals” become “palpable currents of light” in Robinson. No longer the limits of our knowledge, but rather the enlightening of our imaginations; a new way in which to perceive our world as immanent and bursting. The terminals become portals through which something has broken through the brass heavens.
In Issue #5, I discussed how love for something might change our perception, actually may allow us to see something better. I think Robinson does that here, and like Dante’s Beatrice, does so by leading us to light.
Drink
Coffee. That’s all I’m existing on.
I’m Seth Wieck. If you enjoyed anything in this email, send it on to someone else. If you hated something, feel free to let me know. We can continue the conversation, either way.