Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

  Whether studying Nature is a help I am not so sure. Everyone will tell you that it is. But I’m speaking for my own incorrigible self. Certainly I’ve spent considerable time doing just this, particularly since living here in Big Sur. I doubt, though, that anyone looking at my landscapes (or seascapes) would be aware of the time and thought I give Mother Nature. Some are bewildered, some clap their hands (whether in glee or affright, I never know) when studying these compositions from Nature. Usually there is something in them which does not belong, something horrendous and unnatural which sticks out like a sore thumb. Perhaps these “flaws” are the result of an unconscious effort to insert my “trade-mark.” To be quite honest, I’m never satisfied with doing plain Nature. Not in a painting, that is. It’s quite otherwise when I’m alone with Nature, when I’m taking a walk in the forest or over the hills, or just paddling about on a deserted beach. Then Nature is all, and I, what’s left of me, but an infinitesimal part of what I’m looking at. There’s never any end to what one can see—just looking, not trying to observe anything in particular. Always, in such moods, comes that sublime moment when you “suddenly see.” And you laugh all over, as we so aptly say. Does not Douanier Rousseau give us this sensation every time we look at his work? I mean, sudden sight and brimming laughter? Nearly all the “primitives” give us this sense of joy and wonder. With these masters of reality, who are usually anything but primitive, we are less concerned with how they viewed the world than how they felt toward it. They make us leap forward to embrace what we see; they make things almost unbearably real.

  Here at Big Sur, at a certain time of the year and a certain time of the day only, a pale blue-green hue pervades the distant hills; it is an old, nostalgic hue which one sees only in the works of the old Flemish and Italian masters. It is not only the tone and color of distance, abetted by the magic fall of light, it is a mystical phenomenon, or so I like to think, born of a certain way of looking at the world. It is observable in the works of the older Breughel, for one. Strikingly present in the painting called “The Fall of Icarus,” in which the peasant with his plough dominates the foreground, his costume just as enchanting and obsessional as the enchanting and obsessive sea far below him.

  There are two magic hours of the day which I have only really come to know and wait for, bathe in, I might say, since living here. One is dawn, the other sunset. In both we have what I like to think of as “the true light”: the one cold, the other warm, but both creating an ambiance of super-reality, or the reality behind reality. At dawn I look out to sea, where the far horizon is painted with bands of rainbow tints, and then at the hills that range the coast, ever entranced by the way the reflected light of dawn licks and warms the “backs of the drugged rhinoceroses.” If there is a ship in sight the sun’s bent rays give it a gleam and sparkle which is utterly dazzling. One can’t tell immediately that it is a ship: it seems more like the play of northern lights.

  Toward sundown, when the hills in back of us are flushed with that other “true light,” the trees and scrub in the canyons take on a wholly different aspect. Everything is brush and cones, umbrellas of light—the leaves, boughs, stalks, trunks standing out separate and defined, as if etched by the Creator Himself. It is then one notices rivers of trees catapulting down the slopes! Or are they columns of soldiers (hoplites) storming the walls of the canyon? At any rate, at this hour one experiences an indescribable thrill in observing the spatial depths between the trees, between the limbs, boughs and branches, between the leaves. It is no longer earth and air, but light and form—heavenly light, celestial form. When this intoxicating reality reaches its height the rocks speak out. They assume more eloquent shapes and forms than the fossils of prehistoric monsters. They clothe themselves in vibrant-colored raiment glittering with metallic residues.

  Fall and winter are the best times to get the “revelation,” for then the atmosphere is clear, the skies more full of excitement, and the light of the sun, because of the low arc it describes, more effective. It’s at this hour, after a light rain, that the hills are ringed with fuzzy trails which undulate with the undulating folds of the hills. Turning a bend, the hill before you stands out like the coat of an Airedale seen through a magnifying glass. So hoary does it look that one scans the horizon in search of a shepherd leaning against his crook. Memories of olden times return, the leavings of childhood reading: illustrations from story books, first gleanings of mythology, faded calendars, the chromos on the kitchen wall, bucolic prints on the walls of the man who extracted your tonsils….

  If we don’t always start from Nature we certainly come to her in our hour of need. How often, walking the barren hills, I’ve stopped to examine a twig, a dead leaf, a fragrant bit of sage, a rare flower that has lingered on despite the killing heat. Or stood in front of a tree studying the bark, as if I had never before noticed that trunks are covered with bark, and that the bark as well as the tree itself leads its own life.

  It’s when the lupin has run its course, as well as the bluebonnets and the wild flowers, when the foxtails are no longer a menace to the dogs, when there is no longer a riot and profusion assailing the senses, that one begins to observe the myriad elements which go to make up Nature. (Suddenly, as I put it down now, Nature seems like a strange new word to me. What a discovery man made when he found the word, just one, to embrace this indescribable thesaurus of all enveloping life!)

  Sometimes I come home on the double-quick, my mind so saturated with ideas and impressions that I feel I must hasten to make a few notes—for the morrow. If I have been writing, these thoughts and sensations have to do with pure irrelevancies. Useful ones, however, since they are often completed thoughts which had made themselves known in embryonic form months, even years, ago. This experience, which happens over and over, only convinces me the more that “we” create nothing, that “it” is doing it for us and through us, and that if we could really tune in, as it were, we would do as Whitman said—make our own Bibles. Indeed, when that dread “mind-machine” is working, the problem is how to take all that’s coming over the waves. The same riot and profusion which I mentioned in connection with Nature evinces itself in the brain. Suddenly, this part of one which had been in abeyance, which one hardly knew was there, begins to exfoliate in all directions. The mind becomes a steaming jungle of thoughts.

  There are other times when I seem to be in what I can only call an autodidactic mood. At such times I am instructing myself in the art of seeing with new eyes. I may be in a painting phase or getting ready to enter one. (These phases come over me like a sickness.) I will sit on the Angulo trail, facing the gigantic ten gallon hat at Torre Canyon, with a dog on either side of me—they go to school too—and look and look and look at a blade of grass, a deep shadow in the fold of a hill, a deer standing motionless, no bigger than a speck, or turn my gaze upon the churning lace which the sea makes around a clump of rock, or at the white collar of foam which fastens itself to the flanks of the “diplodoci,” as I sometimes call the half-submerged beast-like mountains that rise up out of the ocean bed to bask in the sun. It’s quite true, as Lynda Sargent used to say, that the Santa Lucia range is hermaphroditic. In form and contour the hills and mountains are usually feminine, in strength and vitality masculine. They look so very ancient, especially in the early morning light, and yet they are, as we know, only newly risen. The animals have done more to them than man, fortunately. And the wind and rain, the sunlight and moonlight still more. Man has known them only a short while, which accounts perhaps for the pristine quality which they still preserve.

  If it be shortly after sunup of a morning when the fog has obliterated the highway below, I am then rewarded with a spectacle rare to witness. Looking up the coast toward Nepenthe, where I first stayed (then only a log cabin), the sun rising behind me throws an enlarged shadow of me into the iridescent fog below. I lift my arms as in prayer, achieving a wing-span no god ever possessed, and there in the drifting fog a nimbus floats about my head, a radiant nimbus s
uch as the Buddha himself might proudly wear. In the Himalayas, where the same phenomenon occurs, it is said that a devout follower of the Buddha will throw himself from a peak—“into the arms of Buddha.”

  But, like the dreamy, wispy fog, I too am drifting. And how good it is just to drift! All the observations so painstakingly noted and memorized evaporate as I leave my place of contemplation to amble homeward. They evaporate, yet they are not lost. The essence remains, stored away in one’s intangible parts, and when they are needed they will appear, like well-trained servants. Even if I do not succeed in making a wave as I knew it in a moment of “sudden seeing,” I at least will be able to capture the waviness of the wave, which is almost better. Even if I forget how certain leaves are shaped, I at least will remember to denticulate them.

  What is maddening is not to be able to capture the light which permeates the world of Nature. Light is the one thing we cannot steal, imitate, or even counterfeit. Even a Van Eyck, a Vermeer, a Van Gogh can but give a feeble illusion of its mysterious splendor. I recall the pang of joy which I experienced on viewing for the first time, in the cathedral at Ghent, Van Eyck’s “Mystic Lamb.” That, it seemed to me, was the closest I would ever get to the divine light of Nature. It was, of course, a light that came from within—a holy light, a transcendent light. It had been achieved by artifice, the most sublime, skillful artifice, which, if we understood it properly, if we were receptive—and how is it we are not?—might yield us intimations of that imperishable light which outshines all the suns of the unspeakably vast multiverse in which we are drowned.

  I want to come back to Tasha Doner for a moment. Whenever I get desperate over my inability to paint what I see or feel, I always summon Tasha to mind. When it comes to horses, for example, Tasha can start at the front or the rear end—it makes no difference—and always turn out a horse. If she tackles a tree, same thing. She’ll begin either with the leaves and branches or with the trunk—but it always makes a tree, not a whisk broom or a bouquet of tin foil. If she happens to begin at the left-hand side of the paper, she moves straight across until she reaches the right-hand margin. Or vice versa. If she starts in the middle, with a house, let us say, she first puts in all the doors, windows, chimney and roof, the steps too, and then proceeds to landscape the grounds. The sky she usually puts in last, if there’s room for a sky. If not, what matter? We don’t always need a sky, do we? The point is that between her thoughts and her very busy fingers there’s never a gap. She goes straight to the mark, filling every inch of space yet leaving air to breathe and perfume to inhale. There are crayon compositions on her walls which I prefer to any Picasso, as I said before, and even to a Paul Klee, which is saying more. Every time I visit the Doners I walk reverently up to her pictures and study them anew. And every time I study them I find something new in them.

  Sometimes I wake up of a morning and, almost before I’m out of bed, I say to myself: “Today I’ll do a Cézanne, by God!” Meaning one of those fugitive water-color landscapes which at first glance seem to be nothing but notes and suggestions. After a few heartbreaking efforts I realize that what I’ve got in hand is not going to be a Cézanne at all but just another Henry Miller what-you may-call-it. Feeling hopelessly inadequate, I think to myself how wonderful it would be if Jack were to drop in. Jack Morgenrath of Livermore Ledge. There are times when it would be a real boon to put a few pertinent questions to a skilled painter friend like Jack. (Let me say in passing that this Jack knows how to work in fresco, oil, tempera, water color, gouache, crayon, pastelles, ink, any damned medium; he can also build a house, lay sewers, fix a watch, dismantle a motor—and put it together again!—or build a mouse trap which won’t kill or maim the mouse but merely hold it captive until he is ready to release it.)

  In a sober mood I realize that Jack is not the person to ask questions of the sort I have in mind. To begin with, it would take all day to get an answer, assuming he didn’t ignore the question altogether. When you put a question to Jack it’s like putting a coin in the juke box. There’s a pause, an eternity of a pause sometimes, during which you can hear your question being referred back to the prime question-and-answer contraption which lies hidden in the exact center of the universe. It takes an eternity to reach the source, as I say, and an eternity for the response to travel back to Jack’s lips, which usually begin to flutter before he is able to articulate. This is an idiosyncrasy I like in Jack. At first I thought he was trying to be difficult, trying to make things more complex than they naturally are. But I soon discovered otherwise. The thing to know about Jack is that he gives everything the same, equally serious consideration. If you show him a door that’s out of kilter, he looks at it, examines it from every possible angle, meditates a while, scratches his poll, then says: “Looks like a major operation.” Which means you may have to tear the house down to set the door plumb. But to Jack, tearing a house down is nothing. He’d tear a mountain apart if it really stood in his way. All of which is to say that Jack is by nature what we would call a Fundamentalist. He’s a Fundamentalist and an Absolutist. Yet smooth and flexible, tolerant and gracious. An anomaly, in other words.

  He is also wise beyond his years. If he thinks and moves like eternity itself, it’s because he’s living in a state of eternity. Thus, whether he’s asked to build a fence, lay a sewer, prune an orchard, dig a ditch, repair a busted chair, or lay bricks, Jack goes about it with that somnambulistic clairvoyance which drives “active” people crazy. But when Jack is finished with a task, it’s done. It stays done. And if you ask him a question it’s answered full and straight, answered for good, so to speak.

  When first I came to know him I had the impression that he was a bit of a braggart. Particularly with regard to his artistic talents. He never said explicitly that he was a past master of this or that, whatever it might be, but he left the impression that he had gone into it so thoroughly that there was no need for anyone (let alone Jack!) to explore it further. Listening to him in this vein I was often tempted to put a pencil in his hand and say: “Draw me a hat, will you?” Of course, Jack’s retort would be: “What kind of hat?” And—“Do you want a rolled brim or a straight brim?” Followed by—“Personally, I think a fedora is what you have in mind.”

  But what I’m leading up to (in the best Morgenrath manner) is this—Jack gave me answers to many unvoiced questions. He gave answers which settled some of my problems forever. I may have been thinking painting, but Jack was thinking, as he habitually does, of what makes painting painting. Or, to put it in a nutshell, of what makes anything anything. Thus, in dwelling on the technique employed in this or that medium, Jack would convey to me subtly, forcefully and incontrovertibly the necessity for right thinking, right breathing, right being. It was always a gratuitous lesson I received—and it always set me flat on my ass.

  Whenever Jack takes leave of me I invariably get to thinking about the Chinese, the Japanese, the Javanese, the Hindus. About their way of life and the meaning which they have given to life. Principally about the ever present element of art which permeates all Oriental life. And about reverence, reverence not only for the Creator but for the created, reverence for one another, for the creature world and the plant world, for stones and minerals, and for skill and talent in whatever guise it may present itself.

  How does Jack manage to reflect this aura of ancient wisdom, benevolence and bliss? Jack is not an Oriental, though perhaps the next thing to it, by blood. Jack issued from the Polish Corridor, as did Doner, Marc Chagall, and so many poets, painters and thinkers who were spared the knout, the hot iron, the horses’ hooves, all the mutilations of body and soul which the Slavs in their sadistic intoxication practice ad nauseam. Transplanted to the Brooklyn ghetto, Jack somehow contrived to forsake the ways of his ancestors and the ways of his neighbors, the latter already poisoned by the American virus of comfort and success. He even forsook art in his determination to free himself, to make his life an art. Yes, Jack is one of those rare souls who has no ambition whatever?
??except to lead the good life. And he makes no fuss about leading the good life either. He just leads it.

  And so, when I’m studying a postcard from Mecca, or one of Utrillo’s suburban scenes, I say to myself, “one thing is as good as another.” Am I happy? Does it make fun? I forget about the good life; I forget my duties and responsibilities. I even forget about the poison oak which is cropping out strong again. When I paint I feel good. And if it makes me feel so good, the chances are it will make the other fellow feel good too. If it doesn’t, I should worry…. Now what were those pigments I meant to use when looking at the hills a while ago? Oh yes, yellow ochre, Indian yellow, brown-red, raw sienna and a dash of rose madder. Perhaps a touch of raw umber too. Good! It’ll probably look like baby shit, but who cares? Moi, je suis l’ange de cocasse. Somewhere I’ve just got to introduce a blob of laque gérance. What beautiful names the pigments have! Sound even better in French than in English. And don’t forget, I remind myself, when you mail that book to what’s his name in Immensee—or is it Helsingfors?—don’t forget to wrap it in a “failed” water color! Strange, how people suddenly develop an appreciation for that which is tossed away! Were I to ask fifty cents for a misfire job it would be refused me, but when I wrap a book with it—as if it weren’t worth a fart—the recipient behaves as if he had been made a priceless gift.

  It’s like when I meet Harrydick in the woods. He’s always bending down to pluck something. Sometimes it’s only a dead leaf. “Look at that! Isn’t it gorgeous?” he’ll say. Gorgeous? That’s a big word. I look at whatever it may be—I’ve seen it a thousand times and never noticed it—and sure enough, it is gorgeous. In fact, lying there in Harrydick’s capable, sensitive hand, it’s more than gorgeous … it’s phenomenal, unique. Walking along—he’s still holding it in his hand, will examine it even more lovingly when he gets home—he begins a dithyramb about the things which lie in one’s path, the things we tread on daily, never even aware that we have crushed them under our heels. He talks about form, structure, purpose, about the unthinkable, inconceivable collaboration that goes on under the ground and above the ground, about fossils and folklore, about patience and tenderness, about the worries of the little creatures, about their cunning, skill, fortitude, and so on and so on, until I feel that it’s not a dead leaf he’s holding in his hand but a dictionary, encyclopaedia, manual of art, philosophy of history all rolled into one.