The Pearls of Brooklyn

On 76th Street between 4th and 5th Avenue, there are two runs of old trees. They brace the street and the old houses brace the trees, making the road seem narrow and solid, you know like a cavern in the heart of the city. Brooklyn, if it stood alone, would be one of the great cities of America but it threw in its lot with New York at the end of the nineteenth century and has been looking back ever since. At five on a February afternoon the street is calm. I have a strange feeling that I will walk this street again in July, when the leaves are on the trees and the sun is fierce and, it seems to me, this will once again be a cave of shadows. The old brownstones here mix with the new, fake brownstones with their bright mortar and too-neat stoops. The moulded iron railings that the wrought-iron gave way to back in the day, are now giving way to brushed runs of stainless steel which billow even in the gloom. The sky isn't even grey, it's New York Brown. But it is what it is. There is deep structure here which a little sun will kindle.

Fourth, here, is sedate. All churches and tired hotels, doctors offices, dentists and places offering lasik on easy terms, whatever that is - my glasses were elsewhere and I couldn't read the signage. But Fifth, and as it happens, Third on the other side closer to the water, are all aglow. There are New York pizzarias and souvlaki palaces. There are Irish bars and steakhouses. Drugstists, candy shops and liquor stores which I have curiously mixed up in the same category, who can say why. But every few shop-fronts along this street, in the drizzly half dark, half neon volcano, there is a grocery store. These shop fronts open into rows on rows of fruit and vegetables. They are fed from basements with weak doors up to the street which you don't step on if you know what's good for you.  A few displays are protected from the rain by plastic sheets, but the best are open to the elements. What's a little rain on a pear, or an orange, or a proper apple, or a drooping mouli? Did rain never fall on them while they ripened in Florida and California? They glow in the lights, like precious fountains of jewels. They are glorious and make my heart sing with delight and that, my friend, is a precious thing among the sprawl of New York City. There are pearls here.

A curious state of affairs

Yesterday there was a full moon on the horizon, just as dawn broke, sitting on top of the long wall of the levees - not that we call them that here. Driving along, if I could have stopped, I could have placed any one of a dozen shapely bushes against its bright white face. Closer to work, stuck in traffic, the moon placed itself in perfect composition with a distant copse. By contrast, the previous morning, I had driven into the face of an angry sky. The clouds had been ripped into a crowd of small, black, ragged faces, all shouting down at the world. Behind the sky was changing from black to a strong but pale blue. Once, it occured to me, I would have described the colours in the sky in angry terms. Today I saw a grain of blues which reminded me of an old doorway, where layers of different blues had all worn away in runs and lines and blisters of paint. It called to mind, in the oddest way, a memory of a page in a school journal, with ink of one shade of blue fading, to be replaced suddenly by a richer, deeper, but different shade of blue, and a teachers words in blue biro against the margin. It called to mind the changing, rippling shades of blue on a boat in a remote fjiord as the sky faded, just as this one was coming to life.

Where did it come from, this shift in the source of words for colour.

January

A still day in mid January between two storms. It is the late afternoon and the sun is low. The trees have been brushed clean by rain and wind. They are illuminated by yellow light but by some trick of the day, it is the contrast which shines. Perhaps it's the dark clouds in layers on the northern horizon, grey and blue, with all shades of blue down to the horizon. The trees look like pen and ink drawings, every branch stark. Every building on the low hills rolling up to the clouds are outlinked in black ink against the glow. Not golden, not buttery, but yellow like a pale sun, or sere, or gentle the colour of fawns, which is no surprise. Every hedge is outlined and there, hiding low, there are some greens. Between the bands of clouds there are white clouds which are turning from the colour of wool scraps on a barbed wire fence, to textured warm yellows and tints of rose as the sun dies. At home we have watercolours, gifts from a relative, which capture exactly this.

Even in midwinter, England can be beautiful.

New York City

This blog is an attempt to learn how to describe light and colour in words. But it so happened that my first and maybe only trip to New York City happened to co-incide with a gorgeous, crisp, early-autumn morning. Sometimes the light speaks for itself, so here is a little photo-essay.

Autumn light, Virginia

If New York failed to cast its spell, I fell in love with rural Virginia at first sight. Finally, I have discovered the England that English people like to tell you that England is like. No crisp packets and scrubby trees and burned out Ford Escorts, but deep gorgeous forests lit by evening light, cut by deep rivers. And roads of course: this is the USA. A long day's work was punctuated by two long drives, one at dawn with a sky red from horizon to horizon, one at dusk with butter slavered on every tree and every glimpse of meadow as smooth and green as a pool table. I drove through the Pocahontas State Park and stopped for a crisp walk, bathing in that light. When no one was around I put my arms around a tree and stayed there for a long while, finally interrupted by a polite cough. An old couple with a small, waggy dog, stared at me strangely. I coughed myself and carried on my way. Rural Virginia is punctuated by real history. Old houses. Failed settlements.  Graveyards.

Travelling without a GPS to save money, I found myself lost on an increasingly rural road. There I found a Civil War cemetary with six thousand graves in it. They didn't invent mechanised warfare in these parts, but they learned its grammar: machine guns, trenches. Big cemetaries. It was noticeable, however, that there were no native American cemetaries. Even Pocahontas is buried somewhere in England, in a lost grave, under a dual-carriageway. As the man said, the last thing a human being needs is a sense of proportion.

Perhaps these beautiful, warm trees are their graveyard, tall and stately, dignified and silent.