I. Watercolors

In 1985 I mapped out four books: the Desert (Names), the Forest (Wolves), Nature into Language/Hieroglyphs (Moon), and a “book of fragments” (Water). This last one because in my teens one of my great loves was fragmentary Greek lyric poetry- which survives essentially in broken lines on shreds of paper, much of it found in the early 20th century in trash recovered in Egypt. But you can tell just from a single fragmentary line by the composition and the quality whether it is Sappho or Alcman or Ibycus, and I’ve put translations of favorite fragments of Alcman and Ibycus in the book.

But in its final form the book came out of the archive of my papers in Texas at the Sowell Collection of American writing on nature and the environment https://swco.ttu.edu/Sowell/SowellCollectionSWC.php. Barry Lopez created this manuscript collection at Texas Tech University and asked me in 2005 if I would be part of it. He was acquiring the papers of a group of writers on nature to create an open study collection as part of a curriculum that would combine the sciences and the arts in an attempt to bring back empirical science- to urgently try to raise interest in and awareness of the imperative of landscape preservation. Barry’s Home Ground, Language for an American Landscape, to which we all contributed, came out of this. When I was a speaker at the Sowell Collection annual conference ten years ago I was paired with Gary Paul Nabhan, the Kellogg Chair in Food and Water Security at the University of Arizona, and water was the big topic of the day- the growing water crisis in the West.

In keeping with this overall project of landscape awareness and preservation my Water book is the first book in a series of authors’ works from the Sowell Collection, and it begins in fragments- a torn scrap of paper i wrote on on the shore of Stocking Island in the Exumas in the 1980s when i was out there alone and a thunderstorm suddenly came up Do you think the waves will hurt?/Hidden by spray they drown the thunder, paired with a watercolor of a conch shell i painted on the same shore twenty years later,

and the following page Lake Superior is raised above the heart of this country like an angel’s wing. Although it is an inland sea, its blue is not the cold steel blue of the ocean, but a kind of rich cornflower blue– with a watercolor of a shallow bay and a birch tree, where the upper branch of the birch is the torn textured edge of a scrap of watercolor paper.

II. The Atrophy of the Eye

I started painting watercolors in September 1994, when the English writer Paul Johnson was visiting us on the farm where we used to live in Dutchess County with his wife Marigold, a Jungian analyst. Paul was speaking at the Morgan Library, but he was never not doing something. To someone like me who loves not doing anything this English tradition is really an exhausting concept. Paul had written many books and was a political columnist in London, but when he wasn’t speaking or writing he was painting watercolors, and this is what he was doing on our farm- and I took up painting watercolors at that time.

Shortly afterward my husband was a guest lecturer on one of the small Cunard boats, the Sagafjord, between Hong Kong and Samoa. There was an older woman from Virginia on the boat who gave lessons in watercolor painting in the mornings, and I learned from her one of the most valuable things I’ve ever heard, which is that you don’t throw it away. You never throw a watercolor away, because you can always come back to it with a wet rag and wipe out the part you don’t like. This is a very useful attitude in life. One can think of other things in this way- you just put it in a drawer and come back to it some day with a wet rag, and find the place to put in the subtle black line that brings it to life. So that is how i took it up again, painting my first watercolors in the Philippines and Vanuatu and the highlands of New Guinea, where we flew up in a small plane and saw the flying foxes, the giant bats, thick on the trees and all across the evening sky.

Nabokov talked about pieces of writing in this way- you don’t throw it away. You keep it in a box for years and wait for the right moment to patch it in somewhere, and this is really true. 

At that time, in the early 90s, I had my first book contract and my husband had given me my first computer. Before that i always wrote in flying eagle journals and spiral notebooks with an ink pen, always carrying a bottle of ink around with me, and being left-handed (something they tried and failed to correct in school when i was a child), i.e.writing with my fingers curled tightly around the pen, my fingers were always dented by the impression of the pen and stained blue. 

I remember the first time i was working intensively on a passage of writing on a computer and suddenly the passage was gone. It was just gone. I had a reaction of animal panic- where was it? It reminded me of the time i was out in the geological survey station on the Red Sea in a little shack that swayed in the wind and had a glass of water on the table beside my little metal cot. A steady trail of tiny ants came up through the sandy floor, up the table leg and up the side of the glass to retrieve tiny drops of water from its inner rim and went down the other side in an unbroken trail. This went on for hours and i decided just for fun to pick up the glass. The ants went into a dead panic- where was it? How had their trail been abruptly broken? They ran here and there, touching each other for reassurance. My reaction to losing my piece of writing was something like that. 

I was in the final stages of pulling the book together from passages that had formed in notebooks over years, and in the intensive concentration required to do that, working around the clock- all night focussed on a computer screen- when i began to feel my vision go. I have always treasured vision and i felt the treasure of vision in me begin to thin out, the richness of my color vision, my sense of depth perception began to sort of flatten out and become drab and dull, as though i had lost it, and the way i got it back was painting watercolors- which requires intensive focus on a single thing for hours. 

When i turned the manuscript in i spent months just painting watercolors, putting a jar of flowers or a bowl of fruit on a card table by a window and focussing for hours on the light, the color, the shadows, trying to get it on the page in the odd hand eye coordination that belongs only to painting watercolors. I went down to the Bahamas with my parents and just looked at the blue of the sea where can i buy that wondrous dye and take it home with me?

The richness of my color vision gradually, very slowly, came back to me.

But what happened to me made me think about what is happening in the world, with eyes everywhere focussed constantly, intensively on screens- looking for something in the screen as though it were real. The phrase that comes to mind is the atrophy of the eye, like the axolotyl in the cave that loses its eyes in the dark- a universal blindness coming upon the world with everyone sucked into the shadow world of screens and artificial light. With the dulling of the senses, the death of beauty.