One of the great things about living in rural Maine is that it opens the door to the unexpected encounters that in art – or at least my old undergraduate term papers on it – are called juxtapositions. Take, for example, the comparison of apple and pear that Henry David Thoreau offers in a journal entry written around this time of year, on October 10th, 1860:
“Pears, it is truly said, are less poetic than apples. They have neither the beauty nor fragrance of apples, but their excellence is in their flavor, which speaks to a grosser sense.”
The playful tone of Thoreau’s pun-laced taste-test gives us permission to take him at his typically suggestive word – as if this were nothing more than a sort of American Renaissance-era Pepsi Challenge. And yet, as Guy Davenport points out in his beautiful study of still life painting, Objects on a Table (from which I am lifting this reference), Thoreau’s juxtaposition also brings out meanings in the individual fruits that we may have forgotten how to savor:
“Apple – prize, temptation, reward – is a symbol containing opposite meanings: love and hate, harmony and discord. Pear is wholly charismatic; moreover, when it displays double meaning like the apple, the meanings are both benign…Pear symbolizes a harmony between human and divine; apple an encounter between human and divine.”
Such a thick combination of symbolic mythologies may seem like heady brew for a Saturday afternoon drive…But I’ll be bold and say that it was at least partly our desire to combine the less poetic but still flavorful pear side of life with a little more of its refined applish smack that – in the same week that one of the juvenile dwarves that we planted in front of our house two years ago split under the burden of its own fruit – my family and I set off for Monson, Maine.
The drive north was windy, with a good half-dozen downed tree limbs scattered across the road. At the boys’ (7 and 10 yo.) request, we listened to podcasts about Midas, Dionysius and the apples of Hesperides, which, you might recall (I didn’t), the goddess of discord Eris handed Paris with the instruction that he give it to the most beautiful goddess at the party…which eventually resulted in his stealing Helen, and starting the Trojan War.
Awaiting us at the end of our drive was the tiny but culturally fortunate town of Monson, which sports a well-equipped general store and, only a few fronts down from then, the Monson Arts Gallery – and then inside this gallery (until the end of October at least) the object of our trip: an exhibit titled “Northwoods: Absence and Presence”, which juxtaposes the paintings of artist Alan Bray and the poetry of Wes McNair.
A Gandalfian force for good in the Western Maine arts and literary scene, Wes McNair is a fantastic teacher and poet (I reviewed his latest book of poetry here), not to mention a contributor to the upcoming first issue of Rustica – which, if you’re reading this post, you probably already know about. The series of classes (free and open to the public) that he gave on Emily Dickinson back in February 2022 was one of the flashpoints of our idea for the journal and a true milestone for my own understanding of pastoral writing, in part because it acquainted me with the amount of importance that so-called “empty” space has, in both Dickinson’s poetry and Wes’s own.
This knack for making even small spaces ring like bells was immediately audible in the first poem that welcomed us to the Northwoods exhibit. “Praise Song” begins with the straightforward (in the Thoreauvian vein, at least) sentence “There was no stopping the old pear tree/in our backyard,” and ends with a pastoral high note that would make Matthew Arnold proud: “I want to know nothing/ but the humming and fumbling of bees/ carrying seed dust on their bellies from my blossoms/ to her blossoms in the dome of green shade.” But to my own mind, it does its best work right in the third-of-an-inch or so of space right in its middle, where the humble daydream of the first stanza becomes the reverie of the second:
In its coltish leaping, “Praise Song” reminds me of Shaker dances or James Wright’s famous “A Blessing”, or maybe John Donne’s “The Ecstasy,” which wraps its own metaphysical statement about disembodiment around the space of a line break: “This ecstasy doth unperplex,/We said, and tell us what we love.” The form of McNair’s revelation is more domesticated than any of these, but its effect is the same: reading it, we register the distance between the juxtaposed realms, while at the same time relishing the continuity that is revealed between them when they are placed side by side, like matching salt and pepper shakers on a kitchen table.
The painting of Allan Bray’s set next to “Praise Song” on this diptych is “Straight Down Rain”, a Monet by way of Madison (or maybe it’s medieval Japan), in which a reflected, rain-softened treeline hangs over lilypads as colorful and inviting as a half-eaten jar of jellybeans. It is a picture whose combination of worlds – staid, law-abiding forest; mischievous, ephemeral water plants – should evoke disjunction, maybe even loss. But the actual feeling I got from standing in front of it was one of intimacy and coziness, as if I were looking through a skylight at two people having coffee in front of their fireplace.
This impression of inhabitation in Bray’s landscapes in the exhibit as a whole – most of whose canvases do not have people in them – was a mystery to me until I completed my first circuit of the paintings and arrived back at the beginning, where I found a quote by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard waiting for me in Bray’s artist’s statement. “There is no satisfactory word that describes the sense that you are a part of what you are looking at,” Bachelard writes. And yet, to me it was exactly the distance between dreamy world and dreaming observer that in most of Bray’s paintings seemed to create the space needed for rich, Bachelardian reverie.
Bray’s trees – like his iris-lakes, and his houses blossoming with so much lamp-light that they seem to turn the night around them into a second, larger house – are careful, intricate, persistent, and friendly. As centers for daydreaming, they are perfect; as symbols of the pastoral dream itself – by which I mean that reverie in which so many of us have imagined that we could “start a life that would belong to us in our very depths” (to use Bachelard’s phrase) – they sparkle like Christmas lights, not least because they place together in a single image the natural world and the geometry of the human brain, which is after all nothing more than a bouquet of feelers exercising the same indomitable energy that plants do when they follow the sun around a room.
Juxtapositions like this made me hungry, even as under-10 attention spans necessitated our exit from the arts center itself; luckily, however, I had a pdf of Poetics of Space on my phone, which I looked at while everyone else was eating grilled cheeses. “These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased,” Bachelard quoted Rilke as saying, begging a question that had bugged me on the way up, and returned to me now as we plugged in directions to head home. Are the “emptinesses” we observe really empty, or are they full of a presence that we haven’t learned to see? For miles out of Monson we seemed to be the only car on the road; but after forty-five minutes we stopped at a downed birch, and watched as two, then three, then five cars appeared, as if out of nowhere, to cut the tree up and drag it off the road – at which point we got back in our car and drove away, into a wilderness that felt both emptier and, for a while at least, more present than it had before.
