Watercolor leaf, Renilde De Peuter.
Dear Today,
A few days into Fall, now, and here is that old feeling. The summer this year was hot, relentless, bleak (although everything is relative, and no summer yet has been as bleak as the smoky-hot summer of 2021). Fall makes me see that my Romantic proclivities are partly, maybe increasingly, Melancholic.
The years I spent in graduate study on the Palouse painting and reading difficult post-modern texts could have been subtitled: Discourses on Melancholia, The Sublime, and The Void. Those were the things to grapple with, vis a vis meaning in art and existence in general. It isn't really important now, except as a signpost of where I found that to recall is to experience melancholia, and Fall, ooh Fall was made for melancholy! It is delicious, actually, if you can keep in mind that sadness is sometimes a choice.
So, the sun lessens, the days slow down, growing things are disintegrating, with only a few stubborn ones continuing to bloom; the longer darkness gives us time to reflect, and boom! You have your melancholy! Add a cherry and whipped cream, while it is still hot, because soon it will be too cold for even these cold and benumbing thoughts, and you will have to focus on the turn, the solstice and the starting up of the signs of spring. It happens very fast here; it has barely become that lovely complicated gray tan, and then boom! again, you have green fuddling up the subtle winter colors. But that is later, for now, baby, let me follow you down into the sweet melancholy of fall and the gorgeous autumn leaves.
