Blog — Maria Mudd Ruth

From the moment I started reading Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, I knew I was going to start re-reading this book the minute I finished it. Poetry is like that and, apparently, so is this lucid memoir and meditation by poet Mark Doty.

I quoted from Doty’s book in an earlier blog about my unwieldy collection of cloud photographs and the strange new art of virtual collections. Though Doty does not write about clouds per se, his thoughts on still life painting are of interest to me as the working title of my next book is Still Life with Clouds.

I have never heard of Doty until I read a New York Times article by Rob Walker, which quoted him and mentioned his book. Though Doty's Still Life with Oysters and Lemon is ostensibly about a still life painting by 17^th-century Dutch painter Jan Davidsz de Heem, Doty moves gracefully from the canvas to explore the art of seeing, intimacy, beauty, and life.

I began reading this slim seventy-page essay on the runway before taking off from Seattle to Denver and finished its last sentence as my connecting flight touched down in Washington, DC. Travel time was about eight hours, but I lost all awareness of time as I read sections of Doty’s beautiful book, contemplated his ideas, stared out the window, took notes, read several more pages, napped, read some more, thought of all the people to whom I would give copies of this book.

And now my problem. Explaining, paraphrasing, summing up, describing Still Life with Oysters and Lemon. What I would really like to do is start with page one and retype the entire book here for you to savor. It’s that beautiful and irreducible. However, I will start with a quote.

“…I have been drawn into the orbit of a painting, have allowed myself to be pulled into its sphere by casual attraction deepening to something more compelling. I have felt the energy and life of the painting’s will; I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into its brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held with an intimacy with things of this world.”

Still Life with Clouds (photo by M. Ruth through a sailboat window)

Strangely, this is what comes over me when I look at a cloud. Strangely, because a cloud is not still, not alive, and too distant really for intimacy.
Yet, I find the clouds as compelling and inviting as the painting Doty has fallen in love with--a small canvas composed of shucked oysters, curling lemon peels, a cluster of grapes, and a shining goblet of wine—not water droplets and ice crystals constantly moving, constantly changing form. Jan Davidsz de Heem’s painting captures a table set 350 years ago, forever fixing the relationship between carefully arranged object. The curls of lemon peel will always curl just so, the lemon wedge will always rest on the grapes, the glistening oysters will never stray from the edge of the brown wooden table, everything will remain clustered around the sparkling goblet, the light will never change, and decay will never taint the soft, ripe air.

Yet still-life paintings are never still, even though the living things in them have been stilled—the lemon and grapes plucked, the oyster shucked, the greenery cut, and the wine long ago separated from the life-giving vine. Our restless imaginations go to work changing them—warming wine, shriveling the oysters, drying the lemon, browning the grapes. We hear the buzz of the fly, smell the fragrance of decay, see the hands of servant or artist himself clearing and resetting the table, shaking out the tablecloth.

We keep the still life moving by adding the element of time to the painting. And though the stories of the artist and his feast are lost to us, we enliven the feast with our own stories. We reach for the goblet, taste the wine, recall our first oyster (maybe also our last), think about the oyster beds, the ocean bays and inlets, the vineyard, the window where the sun pours in from the left, what is outside the window. We break the serene silence of the still life with sounds of the market, the clopping horses on the cobblestones, the gulls, the fruit vendors, and (because we cannot help ourselves) fish mongers and huge wooden clogs. I am looking at Jan de Heem’s painting now, the one on the back cover of Mark Doty’s book, and this is exactly what happened.
So what exactly happened? A kind of intimacy. With the painting, with the eye of the painter. And with the "I" of the painter. We inhabit for a brief time the soul of the painter. We see through him.
From the experience of looking at this particular painting, Doty moves to wonderful stories of his grandmother's striped peppermint candies, of other still-life paintings, lost loves, yard sales, of chipped blue-and-white platter, and new loves. And they all express the highest value: intimacy.

“...what we want is to be brought into relation, to be inside, within...But then why resist intimacy, why seem to flee it? A powerful countercurrent pulls against our drive toward connection: we also desire individuation, separateness, freedom. On one side of the balance is the need for home, for the deep solid roots of place and belonging; on the other is the desire for travel and motion, for the single separate spark of the self freely moving forward, out into time, into the great absorbing stream of the world.
A fierce internal debate, between staying moored and drifting away, between holding on and letting go. Perhaps wisdom lies in our ability to negotiate between these two poles. Necessary to us, both of them—but how to live in connection without feeling suffocated, compromised, erased? We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.”

This is the banquet Doty lays out for his readers--a feast for a cloud watcher studying themes of restlessness and sense of place.

I have been reading a marvelous story of Luke Howard, the man who gave the clouds their names in 1802. The story is told by Richard Hamblyn in The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies.
In the second chapter of this book, “A Brief History of Clouds,” Hamblyn discusses the development of a branch of meteorology called “nephrology”—the study of clouds—which began in Greece in the 6^th and 7^th century B.C. Back then, scientists were philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers and were interested in theories on the composition of the universe (earth, water, fire, air in various combinations and proportions), how the earth was held afloat (on an aqueous bed), and what exactly clouds were (vapors of melted snow carried aloft by summer winds). In 340 BC, Aristotle put forth his ideas on clouds in his treatise, Meteorologica, which emphasized the role of the four essential elements (earth, air, fire, and water) and their associated paired qualities (heat and cold, dryness and moisture) in nature. The clouds were simply exhalations of the warm and moist elements of the physical earth; the exhalations mingled into various cloud forms in a layer halfway between the earth and the heavens.

The Greeks “had not meteorological instruments with which to confirm or refute their observations of nature,” writes Hamblyn, “but in a sense this hardy mattered as their genius lay more in the questions they asked than in any of the answers they hazarded.”

Aristotle’s theory dominated nephrology for two thousand years, until, ultimately, 17^th-century philosopher, Renee Descartes deduced that the clouds were “most likely water droplets or small particles of ice formed by compressed vapours given off my objects on the ground, rather than my Aristotle’s mingled ‘exhalations.’” I have not read enough of Descartes to know how he arrived at this conclusion, but it is amazing that he arrived at it at all given that, even when armed with an extra four centuries of knowledge and technology, most of us would falter when asked to explain (well) what a cloud is.

Hamblyn puts Descartes theory in historical context:

“The span of Descarte’s life had see the six instruments introduced which would determine the future direction of all scientific investigation: Following the appearance of the telescope, the microscope, the air pump, the pendulum clock, the thermometer, all in the first half of the seventeenth century, scientific inquiry would never be the same again. Shared methodologies, whether in the field, the laboratory or the private museum, would arise as the mans to apprehend the teeming world of things. Meteorology shared in this gathering sense of advance and, in concert with the rise of other kids of measurers and compilers, the era of the weather collector had begun.”

I was about to get hung up on Descartes, when I got hung up on the word “collector” instead. I don’t like the word. I’ve never been a collector of things, but lately—thanks to the pocket-size digital camera I have—become a collector of images of clouds. Thousands of them. Every time I leave the house for a walk or to drive somewhere, I talk my camera “just in case” I see a beautiful, interesting, or unusual cloud. This, by the way, is all of them.

The photographs are either on a card in my camera, somewhere in Adobe Photoshop, or in various folders labeled Stratus, Cumulus, Cirrus, Mixed, UFO. Most are in the UFO file. I have too many photographs to identify and sort. But I can’t delete them. I need them, all of them, not just the good ones.

So what’s the problem? At least I’m not using film, paper, and toxic chemicals to develop them, right?

Right. The problem is that once I take a photograph—once I hear the shutter click—I stop looking at the cloud. What’s worse is, I also stop seeing it.

Here’s the typical sequence: 1) While searching the sky for an beautiful/interesting/unusual cloud, I spot one, 2) I pull out my camera and photograph it, 3) I put my camera away and walk on because, 4) I feel I have “acquired” the cloud and the ability to look at it later, identify it, categorize it, post it on my blog.

“Quickly we stick labels on all that is, labels that stick once and for all. By these labels we recognize everything but no longer see anything.” This from a book called The Zen of Seeing, by Frederick Franck.

Alaskan writer/photographer Kim Heacox tells a story in The Only Kayak of throwing his very nice camera into Glacier Bay when he realized that it was an impediment to his relationship with the wilderness and to really seeing what was in front of him. As long as he toting a camera and collecting images, he wasn’t purely being in the wilderness, seeing it purely with his own eyes. Kim eventually replaced his camera and has since made himself quite a reputation as a wilderness photographer. I imagine the act of drowning his camera had something to do with developing his keen eye.

Collecting is funny business. Animals collect and store food as a survival strategy, but we collect as a hobby. Trinkets and things stores want you to buy in multiples are called “collectibles.” (Gee, isn’t pretty much anything collectible?) Yes! I have the official Cloud Collector’s Handbook—a handy book of photographs of major and minor clouds by type with points assigned to each type based on its rarity. A common stratocumulus earns 10 points, an altocumulus lenticularis (the UFO cloud) 45 points. Published by the Cloud Appreciation Society, the slightly tongue-in-cheek book works the way a Life List does for birders, allowing the use put check marks (but no points) beside the observed bird. Collecting names, lists, and even photographs of birds gained and continues to gain popularity when collecting birds (aka shooting or trapping) was dooming them (the great auk, Carolina parakeet, ivory-billed woodpecker, and passenger pigeon to name a few). But cloud collecting?

The point of the book is to get people to look up, see the clouds, and have some fun trying to learn what type they are. "You don’t have to own something to collect it," writes the book's author, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, "You don’t even have to hold it. You just have to notice it and record it." This is admirable in this age of consumption, though you do need to buy the book to be able to collect the clouds. I just hope the collectors remember to keep looking up after they check off the clouds and tally up their points.

Photo courtesy Saophlkun Ponlu and Creative Commons

A few Sundays back, I read an article called “Fun Stuff: Why pictures of object collections are popular now” in the New York Times. Apparently, the American consumer’s attitude toward “stuff” is subtly shifting. People aren’t so interesting in buying stuff, but in seeing online images of stuff—“lovely photographs of carefully arranged groups of objects.” You know, groups of scissors, pine cones, measuring cups, sewing bobbins, baseball bats—all artfully arranged and photographed and posted online. What’s going on here?

Rob Walker, the author of this article and seven years’ worth of other ones appearing weekly in the “Consumed” column, says these images are merely modern still lifes. What these online virtual collectors are doing with scissors and measuring cups, early painters of still lifes were doing with fruit, flowers, goblets, freshly killed rabbits, fish, and fowl. The various objects were assembled, carefully juxtaposed, and, by the artist’s skillful brush, turned into a still life that promised to be more than a sum of its parts. As museum goers, we stand before the work of a 17th-century Dutch Master, marveling at the detail all the while looking for something else in the painting.

The still life, Walker writes, is a “genre whose attraction…has less to do with documentation than with capturing a way of seeing.

And then he brings in a poet for the clincher. The poet is Mark Doty, author of Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, in which he observes that still lifes capture “A faith that if we look and look we will be surprised and we will be rewarded.”

And that, I realize, is exactly what I am doing. Except that I am the still one and am looking and looking at the restless clouds for something surprising and rewarding. And if I am still enough for long enough, and if don’t reach for my camera, and because I am not looking to gather information as Aristotle and Descartes were, that something surprising and rewarding is often a message to let go.

Let go of the stuff, let go of the images of the stuff, let go of the camera, the jpgs, the categorizing, the binomial labels. Just watch the cloud, see the cloud alone with your eyes.