From Another Notebook

On the Taking of Notes:

An image becomes treasure, passed from mind to mind. We four are collectors of images.

One of us find bark, one finds leaves encased in ice. I write, 'encased in eyes'. Someone finds ice in water. Someone else notices the fog coming fast through the valley.

Item: dock stem rising from snow. Black-red shadow puppet, explosively notched and zing-rippling. Leaves hanging small, spriteish, black leaf soulish, vaguely hellish, hot and vibrant.

Item: meadow grass. Disconsolate, lonely and drooping.

Item: thistle.

Item: spine.

Snow like white linen.

We take nothing sappy, only what the year has already discarded. As we look at our images, turn them over, warm them, they are revivified, born to us. We exchange our time for their lives, our lives for theirs.

The snow turns from blue to white to blue again, as the sun rises and sets. We give our day to the snow and in return it gives itself to us.

The Gathering of Artists

My first Image from our day recording the Winter Solstice.
A group of Artists, heads buried deep into their books.
The silence was stunning.

Written in Snow

We lay our images, our words on the almost-cloth of snow and compare them: this frozen stem; this pattern that once led to flowers, to seeds; this eruption of something other than whiteness. We break them from branches, pick them up from the floor, pass them between us. We say, 'The trees are like lightning.' Our voices are loud against the snow. The sounds move quickly, on huffish breath, carrying meaning.

'Like lightning, that's good.'

'Yes, that's good. I'll have that.'

We collect them in our pockets and take them home to pile in the kitchen beside the cooker and ashtray. On each stem and sound, the ice is already melting.

Spirits up

Perusing the journal of the original observer and interpreter of the woods and found this perfect description of why we chose to spend a day trudging through the snowy countryside:

Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.

Read the full entry for Christmas Day 1856 here:
The Blog of Henry David Thoreau: spirits up...Thoreau's Journal: 25-Dec-1856

I am coming down with the Solstice cold so am particularly grateful to be able to travel with Henry David through snowy Concord, Massachusetts, from the comfort of my bedroom. At my side: homemade ginger fudge, hot tea and mince pies, and a warm terrier. The sky is lightening and it has stopped raining. Perhaps I can muster a walk in the woods after all?

Footprints on snow

photograph by Sian Thomas, © 2009

"To love with all one's soul and leave the rest to fate, was the simple rule she heeded. 'Vot zapomni' -- now remember -- she would say in conspiratorial tones as she drew my attention to this or that loved thing in Vyra -- a lark ascending the curds and whey sky of a dull spring day, heat lightning taking pictures of a distant line of trees in the night, the palette of maple leaves on brown sand, a small bird's cuneate footprints on the new snow. As if feeling that in a few years the tangible part of her world would perish, she cultivated an extraordinary consciousness of the various time marks distributed throughout our country place. She cherished her own past with the same retrospective fervour that I do now her image and my past. Thus, in a way, I inherited an exquisite simulacrum -- the beauty of intangible property, unreal estate..."

-- from 'Speak, Memory' by Vladimir Nabokov