A Certain Slant of Light

A Certain Slant of Light

Kaaterskill Clove, a deep gorge in the Catskill Mountains, New York, was a favourite walkers’ destination in the nineteenth century, and increasingly, as aspects of the Romantic sublime influenced American aesthetics, it was a subject for painters. One of the most arresting images of Kaaterskill Clove was painted by Harriet Cany Peale, of the Hudson River School, in 1858. It is in the style which has recently – not without controversy – been characterised as “Luminist” because of the Hudson River painters’ fascination with light, and the efforts they took to conceal their brush strokes, with results which to the modern eye seem photographic. Many of their paintings, ‘Kaaterskill Clove’ included, emphasise the tranquil and serene in nature, even when the landscapes they depict are the product of colossal ancient forces.

‘Kaaterskill Clove’ is a thrilling exploration of the effects of light on water, stone and trees, and of the subtle gradations in our perception of foreground and distance. Light plays on water which runs beyond where the easel was placed, except where the shadows of fallen boulders make the surface transparent, so that we can see the stones at the bottom of the stream. Light and shadow pick out the cracks and pits in the boulders themselves, and in places, the fruiting bodies on the mosses are backlit. Light reflects in white splashes on the broadleaf tree to the left of the composition, but suffuses the needles of the conifers, which dominate the middle distance, with a yellow glow. Two distant mountain-sides are graded into haze. The right hand side of the picture is dominated by solid stone, out of which opportunistic saplings are growing, all in shadow. But the eye is drawn inexorably to the top right hand corner of the picture, where the sun, the disk of which is wholly obscured, haloes the upper portion of the crag with golden light. One gets the impression that it is just about to emerge in all its dazzling intensity, but at this moment, it is the slant of the light which sets the picture shimmering.

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Emily Dickinson, too, was fascinated by slanting light, as by slanting meaning and slanting rhyme. In 1861, she was fascinated by how “the Sun rose – /A ribbon at a time” so that “The Steeples swam in Amethyst”, and equally fascinated by the purple light of sunset cast upon a stile, over which children climbed into evening, or toward death. Slanting light reveals the transitoriness of things, and perhaps that is why we revel in its beauty. In 1865, it is the angle of sunlight in springtime which brings a sense of the numinous “That Science cannot overtake / But Human Nature feels” – an undefinable presence that eludes rationalisation, yet “almost speaks to you”. The coming of summer brings “A quality of loss” as this angled light is restricted to the mornings and the evenings, and that which was somehow unearthly is replaced by something more mundane, “As Trade had suddenly encroached / Opon a Sacrament”.

I have felt this sense of the sacramental in early spring many times, particularly in deciduous woodlands, where the slant of the light illuminates freshly-opened catkins and buds, and the lengthened shadows of tree boles cut across the swathe of dappled sunlight on last year’s leaf-mould. It is indeed something not susceptible to “Trade”: a value which cannot be calculated, a blessing which no bargaining or barter can procure. It encourages a recalibration of the senses – a fresh refusal to see everything as normal and unsurprising – a reinvigoration of the delight we experienced as children at the glints of sunlight on the edges of a pinnate leaf, the transient tilt of a butterfly’s wing, the shock of the visceral in a freshly-opened flower. It is better than any drug, because the mind remains lucid though transported, and the heightened vision is a product of nature itself, rather than a manipulation of it that mauls the chemistry of the body. In small children, it may manifest as the sighting of “fairies” at the bottom of the garden, an impulse to delight in life and light; if we can retain it into adulthood, we have recourse to a joy with a genuine basis in the real.

But as Harriet Cany Peale must have realised, we must seize these moments while we can, for they are transitory. Slanting light can also have the opposite effect. It can weigh down the spirit, especially if it is a waning rather than a waxing light:

“There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –”

That weight on the heart – which Dickinson might have felt when dogmas were dictated to the tune of a pipe organ, perhaps proclaiming that Jesus is the Light of the World when she had no inner compulsion to believe that this was true – can also slump hefty inside us for no other reason than that we know the light is dying and not arising.

“Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the Meanings, are –”

This sense of dislocation – of a radical mismatch somewhere within – is just as natural as that sense of joy. It is abjection – a certainty of impending darkness and of doom. But Dickinson was too sophisticated an observer to deal in simple dichotomies of darkness and light. Darkness can be an enfolding, nurturing womb. It is not the darkness itself which is the source of horror; it is the waning slant of light which announces its inevitable disappearance like a verse from the Book of Revelation:

“None may teach it – Any –
‘Tis the Seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –”

When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, ‘tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –"

Distance is, I think, the thing which horrifies us the most: distance from loved ones in this life, the unbridgeable distance between those who are still alive and those who are dead, and the distance which is perhaps the most insurmountable obstacle of all: the fact that we can never perceive as another perceives, can never experience what another experiences, can never know as another knows. The look of distance on a dead person’s face, just moments after death, is preceded, it seems, by a moment when everything listens – a stillness in which the distance demands to be accepted. Or try going to an airport departure lounge and looking at the faces of people who are soon to be parted: the way they hide their desolation at the moment when their former lives are fading away and about to become unreal. The slanting light of winter is our reminder that this always must be so: that we are subject to it, and must submit – that departures are our standard state of being.

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Yet Emily Dickinson and Harriet Cany Peale both bothered to create, and especially to sustain the moment of illumination through poetry and art. Why? Because it is an impulse and a reason for being. For Dickinson, it is not just illumination; it is inebriation:

"I taste a liquor never brewed
From Tankards scooped in Pearl –
Not all the Frankfort Berries
Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of air – am I –
And Debauchee of Dew –
Reeling – thro’ endless summer days –
From inns of molten Blue –"

Another thing tends to intensify the intoxication of this slanting light in spring: the presence of insects and the flowers they visit: creatures apparently abandoned to the moment, powered entirely by sunlight.

"When “Landlords” turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove’s door –
When Butterflies – renounce their “drams” –
I shall but drink the more!"

The foxglove is structured in such a way as to entirely admit the body of a bumblebee into the tube of its calyx, a translucent, perfumed, nectar-filled chamber which beguiles the bee with hedonistic pleasure. When it emerges, sunlight glances off the minute panes of its wings. We don’t need magic mushrooms to participate in the pleasure of the bee. All we need is the ability to recalibrate our perceptions so that we are seeing things afresh. When I look at the way my baby grand-daughter stares with exquisite fascination at coloured objects, I know that in that moment, she is fulfilled in a way that touches eternity. This faculty is latent in all of us. It’s just that society and expedience teach us to switch it off. Poets and artists, though, can never quite do that, and that is why, in the age of digital media, we need them more desperately than we ever did. They show us life, instead of the pale, thin, flaccid thing we have come to assume life to be.

"Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats –
And Saints – to windows run –
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the – Sun!"

And suddenly, it is not the light that is slanting – it is Dickinson, leaning into it, not in submission, but in a joyful self-surrender that cries out to be expressed. Peale’s paint and Dickinson’s poetic form become the media of joy, transmuting the transitory into the eternal. Frivolity could not be more deeply serious. The only worthwhile answers are in bees emerging from foxgloves, and in the lucence of moss upon the stones. Try showing these to a growing baby, and her face will tell you this is true.