The Overstory: First Impressions and "Wild Orchard"

I’m afraid this won’t be a very rational post. I started reading Richard Powers’s The Overstory this week. I’ve read twenty-three pages: a prefatory section called “Roots,” and the first chapter, “Nicholas Hoel.” I read these twenty-three pages over two readings, with a few days in between, because it was so good I waited to pick it up again until I could give undivided attention. Twenty-three pages. In them: a saga that stretches over almost a century. Four generations of a family and a story about the chestnut tree brought west as a seed. Twenty-three pages full of characters and yet, I cared about each one. I cared deeply about that tree. Actually, I cared, already, about all trees. There were so many wonderful things happening in those pages and as I read, I couldn’t believe the things that were possible with words: descriptions, humanity, rhythm, emotion, so many universal, a-ha moments. Really. And at the end of the first chapter, I cried. I know that sounds very dramatic but I did. Like the way you’d cry if you saw a baby born, or a particularly impressive natural phenomenon your mind almost can’t process. Or an exquisite painting. Or how you'd cry if you just read fiction that fuels the part of you that believes in the boundless ability of words to touch hearts and souls, that part of you that has always believed but sometimes forgets, for a while.

I don’t know if the next 480ish pages will be able to maintain this level of wonder for me, but for now, I’m loving The Overstory, irrationally. Obviously.

 

This chapter also deals with the history of the chestnut blight in America, which you can learn about by watching this brief video:

 

And now, as promised, your first tree poem...

 

Wild Orchard

by William Carlos Williams


It is a broken country,
the rugged land is
green from end to end;
the autumn has not come.

Embanked above the orchard
the hillside is a wall
of motionless green trees,
the grass is green and red.

Five days the bare sky
has stood there day and night.
No bird, no sound.
Between the trees

stillness
and the early morning light.
The apple trees
are laden down with fruit.

Among blue leaves
the apples green and red
upon one tree stand out
most enshrined.

Still, ripe, heavy,
spherical and close,
they mark the hillside.
It is a formal grandeur,

a stateliness,
a signal of finality
and perfect ease.
Among the savage

aristocracy of rocks
one, risen as a tree,
has turned
from his repose.

 

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Focus and Layers

 

 

I saw a painting a couple of weeks ago in New York, at the MOMA. I didn’t note the artist’s name; I didn’t take a snapshot with my phone. If I’d known how much it would linger in my consciousness, I probably would have, but I did not and so, I did not. I have spent too much time the past couple of days googling and perusing MOMA’s online directory of exhibits for the image. After contemplation, I think maybe it’s best I don’t see it again. But I’ll describe it for you (or at least, my sketchy memory of it).

It is a realistic painting, like a still life or a portrait. The subject is a single sheath of paper, an advertisement for a bird feeder (or something related to gardening?!?). So there is the newsprint, top to bottom, different fonts for the heading and the text, inserted blurbs with exclamatory selling points. There are some pictures—drawn or graphic, not photographic (I think). Basically, it’s an ad like you’d see in a magazine. Lots of detail, countless painstaking brushstrokes.

And yet. There are also some sections the artist has chosen NOT to show in focus. There are circular sections that give the impression of a drop of water—whatever is beneath is blurred—and sections that are sharply focused, so that the exercise of “reading” the painting requires that you mentally fill in pieces, here and there. My eyes traveled from section to section, here picking up a fragment of print, there ingesting a dark-smudged image, my mind piecing it all together as I went along. It was like a symphony of visual input, all building to a complete message.

I’ve been contemplating the layers of this painting, from its start as (perhaps) a single page ripped from a magazine to the impression it made on me, a visitor to MOMA. The artist translated her impressions of the initial image into the painting. She made certain choices as to which parts she’d put in sharp focus and which ones she’d blur. I took away my impressions, further complicated by weeks of distance, the frivolity of memory (and forgetting), supplemented by my occasional musings on the painting, and the topic of artistic layers and focus.

So. Isn’t it a frustration and yet, an ecstatic joy, that each visitor to the MOMA will see this painting, brand new and with their own lens, that they will choose, as the artist chose, what to focus on and what to pass over, that they will leave with their own version of the piece (also: the story, the song, the poem, etc.)? And these layers are a communication we can share, and the focus is our individual light in this sometimes dark world. All because of an advertisement for a bird feeder, in the pages (perhaps) of a magazine.

 

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