Sunset, Thursday, 9 July 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Yesterday’s phenomenal clear light along the Rivanna brought to mind a scene from the 1890 Ambrose Bierce story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” – a story, I might add, I probably wouldn’t know anything about except for a fantastic 1962 short film based on the story. (More about that soon.)

In the story, set in the Civil War in the South, a local Confederate sympathizer, a planter, is to be hanged from the bridge at Owl Creek by a Federal patrol. As he plunges, it seems the rope breaks, he frees himself of his bonds, and he reaches the surface of the creek, where everything takes on a sort of super-reality.

Something in the awful disturbance of his organic system had so exalted and refined [his senses] that they made record of things never before perceived. He felt the ripples upon his face and heard their separate sounds as they struck. He looked at the forest on the bank of the stream, saw the individual trees, the leaves and the veining of each leaf – saw the very insects upon them: the locusts, the brilliant-bodied flies, the grey spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig. He noted the prismatic colors in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass. The humming of the gnats that danced above the eddies of the stream, the beating of the dragonflies’ wings, the strokes of the water-spiders’ legs, like oars which had lifted their boat – all these made audible music. A fish slid along beneath his eyes and he heard the rush of its body parting the water.

O.K., yesterday wasn’t quite like that – I don’t know what substance I’d have to ingest (or what near-mortal trauma I’d need to endure) to get that kind of perception. But if you have a chance to see the film (it’s about 25 minutes and you can view it online here), you’ll see a brief, lyrical section that expresses this beautiful state much better than the story does. It includes a song and imagery so compelling, after I saw it when I was 15 (the French film, winner at Cannes for best short, was shown on The Twilight Zone in ’64), I misremembered this section as an extended reverie taking up most of the film. It is indeed an extended reverie – even if it lasts for only a minute or two.

There are just too many avenues I might like go into, about the film, and sunset, and some of the ideas that have been started in previous posts (not to mention The Old Gringo, in which Ambrose Bierce is said to be the title character) – I think the best thing for now is just to recommend it (it can also be found as part of a Twilight Zone compilation) and perhaps come back to this later. I believe I’d have to channel Marcel Proust to put it all together, and that’s not happening anytime soon ...