Rhyme Paysage

There’s a gaso­line rain­bow in an alley near­by. That same kind of scene on the back wind­shield of my car; there must be some chem­i­cal left on it, because a rain­bow slides down with the snow as it melts. And that’s where the thought ends. It’s hard to say much about rain­bows like this. Know­ing the cause can­cels out enjoy­ing the effect.

In prac­tice it seems as though our emo­tions toward the land­scape get sort­ed by cus­tom into two very large box­es labeled Praise and Blame. If that Praise is for a mys­ti­cal uni­ty of nature, where­by all is mag­i­cal­ly one, the Blame gets assigned to a demi­urge out­side it, for­ev­er bring­ing forth new mon­strous things, leav­ing bits of foam and film where they shouldn’t be. 

Or maybe it is more fair to say that by cus­tom that only the feel­ings that can trans­late to Great Praise or Great Blame are worth feel­ing, or shar­ing. If we had but parceled out the world out­side in a dif­fer­ent way, not as land­scape, or gar­den­ing, or real estate, or what­ev­er, it might be worth dwelling on a rain­bow in gaso­line, some­thing that in its pet­ty harm is ruled out of bounds. A col­league remind­ed me the oth­er day of some­thing Mary Dou­glas said: ​“Attribut­ing dan­ger is one way of putting a sub­ject above dispute.”

Late­ly you can hear all sorts of fog­gy ambi­ent albums. Their cov­ers are iri­des­cent and gray, no let­ters or words. You can’t tell what they show. They look a lit­tle Pho­to­shopped and more than a lit­tle Mid­jour­neyed. They are too ful­ly ren­dered to be non­com­mit­tal. Well, they still seem non­com­mit­tal. They at least match the music, which is iri­des­cent and gray. They must be for the peo­ple who do not want to be in woods, or in clouds, but to be stretched out through a film, beyond dispute.

As a child I was stuck on a Czech car­toon, Krtek Malířem (“The Mole as a Painter”). A mole finds some paints and goes around paint­ing the woods and the wood­land crea­tures in scream­ing psy­che­del­ic col­ors. Even­tu­al­ly they all get washed off by the rain and the col­ors col­lect on the ground in swirls. Why such a thing was avail­able in the pub­lic library, I don’t know; but my father would bring home the film reel over and over. It’s an uneasy thought now, to imag­ine ani­mals cov­er­ing them­selves with paint; but it is a cheer­ful thought to breed pan­sies or pythons until new col­ors man­i­fest in their bod­ies. The life of a Tri­col­or Euro­pean beech acknowl­edges the fan­ta­sy: what if all the leaves weren’t that same bor­ing green? 

My col­league Cur­tis Roth is set­ting up machines through­out the build­ing that make sheets of soap film. He says that the film is con­nect­ed to a data­base that uses the lives of the soap struc­tures to reg­is­ter infor­ma­tion about the inte­ri­or cli­mate of the build­ing. The name of this piece is ​“Going Fragile.”

Lit­er­al films, phys­i­cal films, films on blot­ter paper. You are only notic­ing a sur­face, a phe­nom­e­non play­ing out. The struc­ture of the film, weak and dif­fuse, mir­rors the nature of your own atten­tion to it. And I tell you that when you are count­ing the col­ors in a gaso­line pud­dle, you are not in touch with any grand secret below the chaos of the sur­face. You are only shar­ing the same qual­i­ty of pass­ing through a pat­tern in time, shar­ing that pas­sage with the phenomenon.