the cassandra pages

Reading Faulkner and the News (5)

A Monstrous Innocence

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Dear Beth,

 

Thomas Sutpen is a monster, but Grandfather learns what makes him tick. “Sutpen’s trouble was innocence,” Grandfather says, an innocence that Grandfather believes he never loses.

 

It’s hard to see what Grandfather is talking about at first.  Sutpen ruins four women’s lives in progressively more dishonorable ways.  At the last, he sires a child out of wedlock by his longtime companion and flunky Wash Jones’s granddaughter, who is forty-four years his junior.  (“‘He chose lechery,’ Shreve says.”)  When Sutpen learns that the child is a girl, though, he decides to treat his mare, who has just given birth to a male, better than Wash’s granddaughter, and tells her so:

 

“Well, Millie, too bad you’re not a mare like Penelope.  Then I could give you a decent stall in the stable.”

 

It’s then that Wash kills him.

 

Shreve is correct, strictly speaking.  When marriage doesn’t produce a suitable male heir, Sutpen chooses lechery.  But he’s never a lecher, never someone interested in women for lust’s sake or even love’s.  He’s even a virgin when he first marries at age twenty, and he admits to Grandfather that he “could neither have suffered temptation nor offered it.”  He’s virile enough, the reader knows, but his sex drive like everything else takes a back seat to his design to acquire a plantation owner’s respectability.  Only after the Civil War ends and respectability is no longer an option does Sutpen get the granddaughter pregnant so he can at least have his design’s bare bones, the male heir.

 

Sutpen innocently hatches his design as a young teen in reaction to being slighted by the Tidewater plantation slave (and, through him, his master).  But his innocence is the rigid innocence of childhood that makes monsters of adults who never grow out of it, “that innocence which believed that the ingredients of morality were like the ingredients of pie or cake and once you had measured them and balanced them and mixed them and put them into the oven it was finished and nothing but pie or cake could come out,” as Quentin says.

 

I think today’s religious fanatics, no matter what their persuasion, suffer from Sutpen’s brand of monstrous innocence.

 

Peter

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Dear Peter,

It's fascinating to me that Faulkner called Sutpen an almost-perfect tragic hero. I could possibly agree with that assessment of Joe Christmas, in Light in August, but for me, a tragic hero has to have a very clear good side, a nobility of character, as well as fatal flaws. I never felt that with Sutpen, and part of the reason for that is Faulkner's own way of conveying his character: at a very great distance. So great in fact, that we cannot warm to him because (like all the characters, much more real because we hear them speak, see them move and interact as they also try to figure the man out) we're never close enough to really feel him in the flesh.

I think this distancing is a further reason why we can see Sutpen and his downfall as an allegory of the South itself. Faulkner, speaking about this book, said that the South labored under a curse - the curse of slavery. Curses, in the Old Testament style, affect not only the king/patriarch but his progeny and the entire tribe or nation-state under that leader, who refuse to "turn away from their wickedness;" the curse can extend "unto many generations." Faulkner seems to carry this out as he kills off all of Sutpen's descendants except for the feeble-minded Jim Bond; his slaves; even the old spinster Rosa who once ran away from him. Our poor narrator Quentin, grandson of the Grandfather who professed Sutpen's "innocence," doesn't escape either; apparently he knows too much and came too close to the source of the curse.

Which, like your comment at the end of your letter, brings up a larger question about innocence itself. If slavery was indeed a "curse," -- or an evil -- did the entire South deserve what happened to it? What level of participation in a communal sin -- and we can think of many of these that societies have participated in and still do  -- is required before an individual is guilty of complicity? Sutpen was certainly a willing participant; I doubt we could say such a thing about his West Indian slaves or his wives. Is he excused by the fact that he was born into a world where his "design" would be not only acceptable but admired, and where acquiring and exploiting slaves and women was behavior shared, to at least some extent, by all the adult males at the top? At what point does an adult, even one steeped in the prevailing culture, bear the responsibility of seeing it clearly and choosing for him or herself?

But going beyond the individual, since the book is also an allegory of a society, we have to ask what, if anything, can stop the curse and expiate the sin. If slavery was an expression of racism, we certainly can't claim that the elimination of slavery eliminated racism. Neither can we claim that the white male claim of superiority  and privilege over all other groups was, or is, confined to the South; as subsequent history and even current events are proving, racism infects North American society as a whole, and has been present since white people first came to these shores.

I have to wonder if our continual collective "moving on" from one oppression to another -- Native Americans, blacks, women, Japanese, Vietnamese, gays, Muslims -- it's a long sad list -- without true self-reflection, justice for the victims of hate crimes, trials of leaders, or reparation for victims -- has contributed to the perpetuation of racism as an endemic and largely acceptable trait that repeatedly bubbles violently to the surface of American society. We have had prophets, too, calling us to truth and repentance, but have we really listened? It doesn't seem that way to me. Faulkner, writing this book in the 1930s, was trying to speak about the South as he saw it approximately sixty years after the Civil War. That's the same distance we now have from World War II; not long, but not short either. When we look at our history since 1940, what can we say about innocence?  Who are the tragic heroes of these subsequent chapters? Who are the victims? Who are we? And where does it end?

Beth

The image at the top is from a set of murals of biblical scenes in Harvard University's Andover Hall, painted in the mid-1950s by Laurence Scott. I'm captivated by them and hope someday to see more of them; apparently the plaster is not in good condition.

Reading Faulkner and the News (4)

[Photo by Ralph Thompson of Faulkner taking to students at the University of Virginia ca. 1957.  The school admitted its first black student in 1950 by court order, and it went coed in 1970.  Faulkner split his residence between Oxford, Mississippi and U. Va. from 1957 until his death in 1962.]

Absalom's Women

Dear Peter,

My freshman year in college, I became friends with an engineering student from the South who lived near me in the dorm (yes, co-ed! 1970!) and was dating a close friend of mine. Like Quentin, he had a southern name previously unknown to me, and he had grown up in a totally different society of teas, lawn parties, cotillions and clear gender roles for both young men and women. He had had a sweetheart with another unfamiliar name - Marleve - and told me how she and all her friends used to get up an hour early to do their hair and put on their makeup before class. Meanwhile, we were burning our bras...if we wore them at all. He liked the university and did well, but he only lasted through his sophomore year, when he went home to be with his girlfriend, shaking his head when he said goodbye to me and saying, "I just could never quite get you Northern girls."

So what about Faulkner's women? If Thomas Sutpen is an archetype of a patriarch, desiring to create a dynasty through his male lineage (but definitely not chivalrous), what about the women around him?

We learn little about his first wife in the West Indies, the unknown octaroon who gave birth to his first son, Charles, repudiated because of his negro blood. His second wife, Ellen, perhaps comes closest to the idea of a "southern belle" - she's lovely, but fragile, and is part of  a "deal" made between Sutpen and her father. Unhappy and unable to assert herself, but dutiful, she bears two children - Henry and Judith - before taking to her bed and dying after a slow, shadowy decline.

Then there's Rosa, the elderly woman whose long rambling narration, delivered to Quentin as a kind of verbal legacy, forms the "core" of the narrative. She's Ellen's cousin but much younger, who comes to live at Sutpen's Hundred with Judith and the negro servant, Clytie, after Ellen's death, and after Henry kills Charles and flees. Rosa, then in her early 20s, becomes engaged to Thomas after he returns from the Civil War (a shell of his former self), but breaks the engagement in outrage after he poses the condition that she bear him a son before the marriage to prove that she can; she goes back to town where she lives in miserable poverty, spinsterhood, and hatred for the next fifty years.

And perhaps the most enigmatic woman of all is the daughter, Judith, who resembles none of these women as much as her father. Peter, one of the most vivid scenes in the book for me is when we discover Thomas wrestling at night in the barn with his slaves, a sort of cockfight scene lit by lamps illuminating the faces of the men of the town, watching the spectacle and drinking whiskey. Henry, the son, can't bear it, but up in the hayloft we see Judith - a little girl then - looking down on the sweat and blood and violence with her implacable, unreadable face. Later, she becomes not a spinster but an archetypal widow, even though her marriage to her half-brother Charles is prevented, and later dies of smallpox. The only emotion we ever witness from her is a sudden gush of tears, almost instantly dried, when her father comes home and she tells him what has happened to his sons.

What do you think Faulkner is trying to tell us through the characters of these women? Are they stereotypes or true to the society he's portraying?

Beth

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Dear Beth,

The Absalom, Absalom! women seem locked into something tougher to break out of than the clear gender roles your disoriented Southern friend found missing at college. To me, the Absalom women are closer to the earth – to something essential – than the men are, and they are more inclined to feel and to act not in furtherance of a design, as is always the case with Sutpen, but out of instinct (usually love) and emotion (usually hate) alone.

To put it more negatively, the Absalom women seem subhuman. But it’s a "subhuman" woman, Sutpen’s octoroon first wife, who follows her instinct (and a smart lawyer’s vague advice) to bring Sutpen down.

Women are like the novel’s blacks.  Funny how Sutpen tells Grandfather the story of his first marriage while Grandfather and he are waiting for Sutpen’s slaves and dogs to hunt down Sutpen’s French architect.  Quentin, who is telling the story of the story (much of the novel’s information is second, third, or even fourth-hand) to Shreve, makes the blacks out to be as primal as the dogs.  They are better hunters than the dogs: their sense of smell is as good as the dogs, but they don’t get stuck barking up the tree the architect entered when they realize he's been hopping through the trees for acres with Sutpen-like tenacity.  Well, when the architect is caught, Sutpen stops his story just at the point when he and his first wife get engaged.  Sutpen is caught, too, by someone as primal and indefatigable as his slaves, but in his story he doesn’t know it yet.

 

It takes thirty years for Sutpen, now at Grandfather’s office, to resume his story.  He tells Grandfather then that, shortly after their marriage, he learns of his wife’s one-eighth Negro blood,  “puts her aside,” and (he believes) settles up with her.  Grandfather, maybe “hollering,” says, “. . . didn’t the dread and fear of females which you must have drawn in with mammalian milk teach you better?”

 

Sure enough, as Grandfather surmises, the octoroon, with her lawyer’s help and quite like Sutpen’s slaves, amazingly hunts down the story’s chief “architect” a few paragraphs later. (For Sutpen is an architect of sorts: he endlessly talks about his “design” to which women are merely “adjunctive.”  “I had a design,” he tells Grandfather.  “To accomplish it, I should acquire money, a house, a plantation, slaves, and a family – incidentally, of course, a wife.”)  The octoroon grooms her son Charles with “mammalian love,” and her lawyer sends him off to Henry’s university with a letter of introduction.  Through the octoroon’s primal love for Charles and her nursed hatred for Sutpen, Henry brings Charles home to Sutpen’s Hundred one Christmas, and Sutpen knows he’s caught.  His and his progeny’s downhill slide starts there.

But the octoroon survives to enable her feebleminded grandson, Jim Bond, in turn, to survive the Sutpen family doom. In contrast, none of Sutpen's white lineage survives.

This sort of wretched and triumphant primitivism shared by the novel’s blacks and women – is Faulkner describing a problem or contributing to it? I’m never sure with Faulkner. This account of a talk Faulkner gave while a writer in residence at the University of Virginia reminds me of the endless debate over whether he was a racist or was someone who supported blacks’ equal rights:

He was not afraid to challenge his UVA audience, as became clear when he decided to commence his second Spring semester in “Residence” by delivering “A Word to Virginians,” a nine-minute speech urging them to help solve rather than exacerbate the growing crisis over court-ordered integration in the Jim Crow South. To 21st century listeners, his exhortations may sound more like temporizings, but at the time they were controversial, and to some in his immediate audience, as you can hear for yourself, unacceptable. (Faulkner at Virginia: An Introduction)

It’s the same with Faulkner and women. I can’t tell what he really thinks about them. But sometimes I believe I want to know what an author “really thinks” only because I find the topic’s richer treatment in his chosen genre to be so unsettling.

° ° °

The last question I’d like to raise about Absalom is the question of innocence. Sutpen comes off as a monster – “the demon,” as Shreve is fond of calling him – yet Grandfather believes he is the victim of his own innocence. Which is it?

Peter

Reading Faulkner and the News - 3

Part 3: Dense as an Overgrown Swamp

Peter, what was the experience of reading this book like for you?

-Beth

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Dear Beth,

Faulkner's tragedies are the only works I can read half asleep and still not miss anything. I don't mean there's nothing to miss – on the contrary! At college, too: I dozed through most of my reading assignments, but I didn't have to turn the pages back very often for Faulkner. I think my conscious mind gets in the way with Faulkner. Faulkner gives it some bones to chew – all those big words to look up – but most everything else seems geared for my subconscious.

Absalom is tough on the conscious reader. Its narrators, whether first person or third, pull him away from his regular reliance on plot and character development. Key plot details are buried in labyrinthine sentences. And characterization through dialog? Forget about it! All the characters sound the same: the dominant ones speak in short, objectively insignificant phrases, while the passive ones – Faulkner's Greek chorus – speak in those long sentences that process and repeat the dominant characters' phrases and put a kind of mental illness, or at least obsession and inexorable amazement, between the reader and the facts. No wonder we all relate to Shreve, who frequently tries to stop Quentin long enough to get a simple narrative point clarified: “'Wait,' Shreve said. 'For Christ's sake wait.'”

So Absalom examines reading, and Shreve is Faulkner's model reader. His conscious mind struggles with the narration, but his subconscious mind catches enough so that he's drawn into the sickness. Because he's a successful reader from outside the South – indeed, outside the U.S. – Shreve demonstrates the universal reach of Absalom's themes. I think it's also significant that Shreve survives, just as Faulkner, who's not known for hope, says in his Nobel acceptance speech that mankind will survive. 

-Peter
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Dear Peter,

Well, in part 1 of this conversation you compared me to Shreve, but I doubt that I'm a model reader! For one thing, I tend to read very fast, and that's not helpful to Faulkner. I really like what you said about his books requiring us to use our subconscious mind; it feels like you have to somehow uncouple your normal intellectual, analytical, processing mind and submit yourself to the flow of words, which are at times almost dreamlike and quite often rambling or even completely crazy. 

I also love books like this that force me to slow down and engage with the writing itself, while at the same time immersing me in a mood and place that feel foreign, dark, ominous, and yet somehow seductive. I'm a very visual person so I'm always constructing mental images while I'm reading. With Faulkner I always feel like I'm in an old black-and-white movie, shot without enough light, and definitely scary; I am out of my element here; there's little comfort or familiarity. That mental place haunts me all the days I'm reading the novel, and for some time afterward. I never realized before that this book belongs to the genre of writing known as Southern Gothic, and while it's not about the occult or ghosts or vampires at all, this "haunted" and demonic quality is palpable. 

When I stopped reading this book each day, I kept thinking about what he was doing. I was stunned by the complex construction of this novel. Multiple narrators, not always clearly identified at first; a great deal of stream-of-consciousness writing; extremely long sentences; and a story that's gradually revealed through flashbacks from many different points of view. The sheer mastery of the craft of writing was pretty thrilling.
What I found especially impressive is that even though the construction is as dense as an overgrown swamp, he doesn't call attention to it, he's not showing off (like some other masters of the "modern" novel we might name) -- it simply becomes another part of the world he is creating for us to inhabit as we read, and this tangled, dark complexity contributes to the book's mood of violence, tension, murky confusion, and impending doom. If I had to use one word to describe the mood of the novel, I might choose "tense" -- what about you?

And from here, I wonder if we might talk about the female characters in the book next, and about women and the South!

Beth

Reading Faulkner and the News (2)

The Plot and that Title

Peter, it's hard to know where to begin with this book, isn't it? We could talk about it as one of America's first modern novels, and analyze its structure. We could talk about Christianity, Calvinism, and slavery, and the concept of the elect and the damned, and how that's still playing out in our culture. Or, as Lorianne mentions in her comment to the first post, about how it addresses southern notions of "ideal" womanhood, and the patriarchy that supposedly protects it. I hope we'll get to all of that eventually. Maybe what I'll do first, though, is spring off your wonderful, Faulkner-esque glimpse at the characters to talk a little more about the plot, and explain the title, so people who haven't read the book won't go nuts or give up on us all together!

Basically, Absalom, Absalom! is the story of Thomas Sutpen, a man born into poverty who gets money, goods, and slaves -- we don't know exactly how -- and comes into a small Mississippi town full of whispering, speculating inhabitants, acquires one hundred acres, and starts to build a plantation and mansion. His goal, beyond building this empire (on the backs of the slaves he's brought from the West Indies) is to establish a family dynasty, so he needs sons.

Faulkner himself said that slavery was the curse under which the South labors, and that Thomas Sutpen's major flaw was his belief that he was too strong to need to be part of the human family; those two curses and how they play out are the subject of the book. I'd argue that it goes even deeper, that what Faulkner explores here is racism itself, in the character of a person who believes himself to be elect while others -- even his own flesh-and-blood -- are cast aside because a tiny percentage of negro blood flows in their veins.

So - the title. In the Bible, Absalom is one of the sons of King David, but he rebels and fights against his father. His death occurs during a battle when his hair catches in the branches of an oak tree, unseating him and rendering him helpless (a clear parallel, I think, to the image of a lynched black man hanging from a tree.) Joab, the enemy, is told and comes back with a posse of soldiers and kills him. But when Absalom's death is reported to his father, David is inconsolable.

In many ways Thomas Sutpen is this kind of Old Testament patriarch; he has many human weaknesses and cruelties but he's also fascinating and exerts a powerful, some say demonic, force on everyone around him. Like the OT kings, he looms much larger than most of the other people on the stage, and affects them all, but he also causes his own ruin. Faulkner makes his story into an allegory not just about one family, but about the South and its downfall, just as the Books of Kings contain cautionary tales about rulers and justice, and what happens when they allow their human weaknesses to dominate their character and actions.

Faulkner may have doubled the name to "Absalom, Absalom!" because there are two sons in his story: Henry Sutpen, his legitimate and pure white son, and Charles Bon, whose mother was an octaroon (1/8 black) whom Sutphen married in the West Indies but repudiated and abandoned after he found out about her (and their son's) negro blood. Henry and Charles, unknown to each other as brothers, meet at university, and their paths toward self-discovery are an essential part of the book's plot.

Beth

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Beth, that's a great summary. I'd just add the incest angle. The Bible's story of Absalom's rebellion against his father David starts when Absalom's half-brother, Amnon, rapes Absalom's full sister, Tamar. The narrator's not wild about the rape, but the incest is the big sin. Absalom plots his revenge for two years, has Amnon killed, and flees when David finds out. In this respect, Henry Sutpen resembles Absalom: Henry kills his half-brother Charles to keep him from an incestuous relationship with Henry's full sister Judith, and then he flees.

But Charles resembles not only the incestuous Amnon but Absalom, also. The Bible infers that Absalom seduces Israel because David doesn't lift a finger to see him over the two years following Amnon's murder. Similarly, Charles is frosted that his father Sutpen never comes to him, never speaks to him, even after Charles knows Sutpen knows Charles has designs on Judith – a match Sutpen tries to get Henry to stop. So Charles seduces Henry and Judith because his father slights him, just as Absalom seduces Israel because his father slights him.

So I could see how Henry and Charles are both Absalom, which might help explain the title. The title may also be shorthand for David's repetitious lament after Absalom's death: “O my son Absalom! O Absalom, my son, my son!”

We're free to draw our own conclusions, I guess: there's no reference to Absalom or David in the novel even though Faulkner alludes to some classical and other biblical texts in it.

Peter

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image sources (click for larger versions): top, "The murder of Absalom," Morgan Picture Bible. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum. bottom, Brettman/Corbis archive, life.com

Reading Faulkner and the News (1)

Over the weekend, I was very excited to discover that my friend Peter Stephens, of Slow Reads, had -- like me -- just finished William Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!" and was willing to have a conversation with me about this and other books by Faulkner, and about slavery and racism as legacies that still affect American society. Peter is an English teacher who lives in Virginia,  while I'm a Yankee with a great appreciation for southern literature but no direct experience of what it's like to live in the south - and the deep south of Faulkner's books in particular. We've been online friends for six or seven years, but we've never met in person, and we're both really looking forward to exploring these topics together on our blogs. We'll try to do this in a way that will be interesting to people who haven't read these books. In the spirit of Peter's "Slow Reading" these posts may be a bit longer than Cassandra's usual, but we hope you'll come along with us. We'll be posting this conversation, as it develops, on both our blogs, with other posts in-between.

Part 1: A Reader's Dream
Peter, I've been on a little Faulkner kick this summer: I read this one, and "Light in August," neither of which I'd read before, and plan to read "The Sound and the Fury" and "As I Lay Dying" next - these are both books I was assigned in high school. I remember being impressed by them but I don't even recall the plots! But "Absalom, Absalom!" stunned me in so many ways. Maybe even though the civil rights struggle was in full swing when I was reading southern literature as an idealistic young person, the characters still felt very removed from the reality I knew. Now that I'm in my fifties and have seen human racism and hatred in many forms, the rose-colored glasses are definitely off, but Faulkner still plunges me into a kind of human darkness and a part of American culture I find hard to truly grasp. The book cover of the original edition captures that feeling well...I think I actually identified some with the character of Shreve, a northern boy who's being told this story by Quentin Compson, his roommate at Harvard. 

--Beth.

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Dear Beth,

I could hardly finish your letter before writing you back. It's a reader's dream: I finish one of the few books that wants to bring on something physical, like a headache or a baby, for all the labor I put into it, and I learn that one of my favorite readers (and I don't mean of only my writing) has just read it, too. It's like we're twins and didn't know it – maybe twin mothers to a single child. I'll play Absalom, and you can be Absalom!

Or you're Shreve, and I'm Quentin, Faulkner casting us by our place: you, like Shreve (as you suggest), from both Canada and New England, and I a child of the Old South, though (as you say) not the Deep South of Quentin's Mississippi, the two (Quentin and Shreve) shivering in a Harvard dorm together one snowy night in 1910 for the last half of the novel, Shreve (he must have heard it from Quentin – who the hell knows how many times they've told it back and forth by the time the reader arrives) telling Quentin what Quentin's father told Quentin that Grandfather told him (Quentin's father) about what Thomas Sutpen told him (Grandfather) about himself (Sutpen (“'The Demon,' Shreve said)), Sutpen finally telling somebody in Jefferson about his childhood, his traveling from western Virginia to Tidewater, Virginia (where I'm from, though now I live in Northern Virginia, or as my aunt who co-authored the Virginia history textbook I read in seventh grade condoning slavery would call it, “Upper Virginia” – the utterance of “North” or “Northern” with “Virginia” as little countenanced here as the faces (and even the horses' faces) of our Confederate statues are from that polar, poles-apart compass point) where he and his siblings see “the first black man, slave, they had ever seen . . .” with his “mouth loud with laughing and full of teeth like tombstones,” and he (Sutpen) being dissed by the black man in the monkey suit at the front door of the plantation's big house, and Grandfather (and, through him, us, the four of us – Quentin, Shreve, Peter, and Beth) collocating Sutpen's past with his and his West Indian slaves' mud-wrestling and his (Sutpen's, yes and Quentin's) eventual doom.

The funny thing is, Sutpen tells the story to Grandfather only to pass the time. Everyone else who tells it – Aunt Rosa, Grandfather, Father, Quentin, Shreve, Peter, and even you, Beth (“. . . since it did not matter (and possibly neither of them conscious of the distinction) which one had been doing the talking . . . Charles-Shreve and Quentin-Henry”) – tells it as therapy, as a fire hose with the story as water or maybe as the fire itself, the pump having surceased and surrendered before the War started or even before Sutphen's heart started pumping - doomed maybe from the womb - or tells it as a futile means of escape, as Mercury (the planet) might talk fast to divert the sun long enough to escape it or at least to gain some perspective by pretending to divert it, Virginia and Harvard and Vermont and maybe even Canada and the twenty-first century themselves caught in the orbit of Jefferson and Sutpen's Hundred and the War and the injustice of slavery, the institution's wickedness greater than my aunt's textbook would allow but not as black and white as the textbooks I would read later paint it but worse than black-and-white wicked for its convolution, for (for instance) Sutpen's two sons, the white Henry (Absalom,) and the mulatto Charles (Absalom!) who destroy each other probably even before they know they're brothers and before they understand the incest they both contemplate but which their sister is willing to accept, and maybe even before they (Absalom, Absalom!) ever meet or are born.

I'm with child to hear about your own experience with the book, Beth; I shouldn't presume to speak for you. And for your part, please don't get me wrong. To quote Quentin's last words, I don't hate the South. “I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!”

Peter

Shorter Days

(I've added a new ending since yesterday)

Tanning salons and shorts notwithstanding, there's no denying the inevitable. The pool near the community garden is still open, but I notice there's a lot more sunbathing on the warm edges and a lot less splashing. The garden itself is filled with late August's horticultural staples: black-eyed Susans, once-pink echinacea fading to a mauve, overgrown cosmos and nasturtiums. Soon they'll turn off the overhead fountains in the wading pools, and then there will be a week of cleaning up before the pool -- they just opened it, didn't they? -- is drained.

" I think people are freaking out a little about the end of summer," J. said to me at 1:00 am on a weeknight, when we're awakened by uncharacteristically noisy partyers and the sound of breaking glass in the alley. We had to get up and turn off the window fan in the middle of last night, and this morning the thermometer, which has rarely gone below 70 degrees, was at 64, so I wore my jean jacket and wrapped a cotton scarf around my neck for the ride to work. Passing the elementary school up the block, I saw that the inside lights were on and teachers' cars parked along the side, and got that instinctive sinking feeling in my stomach, almost as if I were going to have to go back soon myself.

Last night we rode our bikes over to the Mile End and wandered down Esplanade, past the industrial reno store, the storefront of the guy who collects lures, the Mile End Mission, the Asian florist - plants cascading from the second floor balcony, covering the street, even the top of a parked car. We stopped at a tiny Vietnamese restaurant for dinner, our orders taken by the husband and cooked by the wife.  Later, waiting for a light, we watched Hasidic Jews, eyes downcast under their huge round fur hats and arms clasped behind their backs, hurrying home before sunset, black coats flapping.

I looked up at the water towers on the roof, the moon rising behind them; there was a definite chill in the air. In the Brazilian restaurant on the corner of Waverly, only one man sat in the outdoor chairs; he had a long yellowed beard, wore a hat and long sleeves, and seemed lost in a hefty book. A young woman and man sat inside near an open window, finishing their meal. She stared intently at the spoon going round and round in her coffee, and then placed it in the saucer with a decisive click. "I'm sorry," she said. "It's been nice, but I'm going to have to wind this down."

New Beginnings

It's taken me several days to get up the courage, but I've taken that first step back into oil painting. I love this first stage of a painting - the smell of it, the freedom of it before anything is decided or reigned in, the wide-open possibilities, the feeling of the brush on the canvas and the knowledge that I've overcome the first big hurdle: beginning. What lies ahead is the struggle and journey that each painting represents, and frankly I have no idea where we're going on this one.

One exciting discovery is that there's a terrific art supply store only a couple of blocks from my studio. It just relocated there from its former home. I promise not to go there very often, but having had to rely on mail-order or a very limited local selection of fine art supplies in Vermont, it seems like an impossible luxury to be able to walk to a good store!

Thank you all for your responses to the previous post. Your positive comments and encouragement make me happy and grateful. As for deciding what to do -- I'm pretty sure that I need to move strongly ahead, building on the past but exploring and taking risks in order to grow. If I really need to make money from the sales of paintings at some point, I can do realistic works like these, but it's not where my heart is and I know that doing them would drain my energy and time and be, in some significant way, a betrayal of self and potential. I'm learning a lot about myself from looking at older work, though, and will be posting more of it in the weeks. These are paintings I love and am proud of, or I wouldn't have kept them, and now they also feel like letters to myself from my past - letters I couldn't fully understand when they were written.

The East Bowl

The East Bowl at Burke, pastel on Canson mi-teintes paper, 19 x 25," c Elizabeth Adams

I've been using pastels on paper trying to work out the color scheme for an eventual Montmorency Falls oil painting. I couldn't find half of my pastels -- two of the boxes seem to have disappeared during the move, which was puzzling -- so I didn't have all the colors I wanted. It went all right but isn't ready to show you, except for the glimpse at the bottom of this post.

However, thinking about pastels did send me searching through my flat file for this large pastel painting from a long time ago. It's the view of the White Mountains that's revealed at the top of Burke Mountain, in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, as you start down the East Bowl, which used to be natural snow only, lift-less, and silent. It was one of my favorite places to ski.

I put the painting up on my easel and looked at it for a while. In spite of everything I've said recently about abstraction and realism, there's a lot about this painting that I like, and I was happy to see it again.  Pastels can be so...saccharine. But this one doesn't strike me that way. I especially like the section up in the trees in the upper right.

Here's another detail:

The truth is that I enjoy doing this kind of realistic work, I just don't want to do it exclusively. Looking at this one made me wonder whether I should try to sell some paintings like this, in pastel or in oil. I'd be happy to have the income. One question is whether or not it would diffuse the energy I want to put into explorations like what I've been doing these past few weeks - is it crucial to forge ahead and not look back, or simply smart to make use of a marketable skill? The other point is that, no matter what, it's hard to make any significant income from art, though selling online has become a possibility, and one that retains more of the sale price for the artist. And I do have professional design work, as well as qarrtsiluni and Phoenicia.

What do you think?

Speaking of Carp

This morning we went over to the south shore again, and took our bikes. While J. was taking photos of one of the grain elevators across the river, I rode further west, locked my bike on an old rack overgrown with rugusa roses laden with rose hips, and followed a narrow trail through the woods to Point du Marigot. This is a nature preserve that runs along the river for a ways, and it includes a waterfowl nesting  site in the trees at the back of this photo - I'm looking from the point that goes out into the river back toward the path that runs along it. The area downriver from this point is a secluded lagoon where the water is much calmer, and it's a haven for waterfowl and shorebirds of every kind.

We saw more great blue herons than we could count. The one in this picture, though, is a great  egret - at least I'm pretty sure it was a great egret rather than snowy egret. There were quite a few of them too. Lots of ducks, lots of geese, cormorants, gulls, and many sandpiper and plover-like things that I don't know well enough to identify. Next time, I'll take the field guide and larger binoculars along.

We were captivated by the terns. I don't know if they were arctic terns or common terns, but whichever they were, they were remarkable fliers and fishers, plunging into the water repeatedly and changing direction in the air - it seemed - in mid-wing-beat, at will. They were noisy, too, calling "keer-keer!" across the water as they harassed the gulls and swooped back and forth over the slowly-swimming ducks.

Two small flocks of geese came in directly over my head, completely unafraid and only twelve feet or so above me; I could see their muscles flexing and felt like I had just entered a clip of "Winged Migration."

This is how close we were to the city; you feel like you're a million miles away even though the container ships are being unloaded right across the water, and there's a big highway beyond the trees.

After we'd been there for a while, a fisherman came along, in hip boots and vest and carrying a fly rod. We watched him creeping along the shore of the lagoon, quite like the herons we'd seen stalking their prey. Suddenly - a huge splash - he had hooked a big fish and the rod was bent nearly double. We watched him play, land and release his catch without ever bringing it fully out of the water, and then went closer to talk to him. It had been a carp, a pretty big one, that he had seen and enticed with a large artificial fly. "They're eating worms and insects right now," he told us, "but they're very wary - I rubbed this fly, which was new, on the grass before using it to take away any human scent." He was a lifetime Montrealer who knows all the natural places close to the city, and especially likes this area near the Boucherville islands on the south shore. "North American fishermen tend to turn up their noses at carp, but in Europe sportsfishermen see them as a great game fish - it's all cultural," he said. "But I release everything anyway - I'm using hooks without barbs, and try hard not to take the fish out the water." What else does he catch in the river? Pike, small and large-mouth bass, and sometimes a sturgeon. I told him I'd seen a huge fish leap out of the water the last time I was there, and he said it was probably a sturgeon - which seems as mythical to me as a flock of Arctic terns.

Decisions

Pencil drawing for a painting.