3.8 miles
river road, north/south
61 degrees
Cooler this morning. Quiet. Ran earlier than usual: 7:30. Lots of traffic on the road, some on the trail too: walkers, runners, bikers, strollers, at least 2 roller skiers. I could hear one of the roller skiers as it approached, scraping their poles on the ground. No clicks and clacks, just scraaaape scraaaape. Running past the rowing club, I encountered a group of people in bright yellow vests emerging from below. Were they rowers, and did they wear those vests on the water?
After reaching the river, I noticed the fence slat, pushed loose by a leaning tree trunk, was looser today. Greeted the Welcoming Oaks, good morning! hello friend! The sunlight was beautiful in the tunnel of trees — thin strips of light coming through the leaves.
Found this poem yesterday. It’s great for my interest in ekphrastic poetry and color:
A Lexicon of Light/ George Looney
–after Claude Monet’s Charing Cross Bridge series
It’s not accurate to say we know
what we see. Truth is, few understand
the physics of color. What Monet knew
had little to do with science. He was
intent on getting the bridge, and everything
that gave the bridge context, right. Language
isn’t accurate enough. To depict the world
with color and form—to make a place
and moment of time a composition—is
no more precise a vocabulary. Vision
tends to end up being an imposition
more than a recognition of how the fog
consumes much of the bridge, as if nothing
is able to fully connect one side
of the Thames to the other. Distance
often asks too much of us, and Monet
found ways to accept that insistence. His
endlessly varied harmonies of color
wrote a new definition of accuracy. The bridge
is more than a construction passed over
by trains and imbued with shifting colors
with the time of day. It becomes, for the artist,
a lexicon of light and all that light does
to this world. At times everything is more
certain, and we want to stand on the bridge
and compose a tune, humming, that the sun,
glittering in the river, inspires. Other times,
we want to be nothing but a faint music,
too distant or muted to be identified,
drifting along with the soothing mist and fog.
accurate / know /
see / Truth
physics of color
not accurate, right
color and form
composition
not precise
vision as more imposition than recognition of how the fog consumes the bridge?
harmonies of color — a new definition of accuracy
shifting colors with the time of day
lexicon of light and all that light does to this world