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gwydionOne of my great disappointments growing up was my first Dawn. After all books and the culture talk up the beauty of the dawn because of the symbolism, but in my experience, they are sickly things. I was always more a sunset and midnight sort of person and to my eyes, the most beautiful part of a dawn is the stretch between false dawn and sunrise, when the sky sings a symphony of blues.
Out here, it is all about salmon belly sunsets over water. Dawn is nothing. It wasn't much better back east. I have always lived with hills and trees that block what little of the sunrise there is. The one place I have seen a dawn that could compete aesthetically with the drama and flash of sunset was along a stretch of Maryland shore.
That summer I stayed behnd in Annapolis with a friend who would be an enemy before the next winter was out. Annapolis was like that for me just generally. Anyway, we explored the nooks and crannies of Annapolis by day and night, wandering far from campus by foot and by car to places Johnnies generally never went. Out where the houses of the rich abutted private docks and thin stretches of shore, there was a tiny overlook where one could pull over and stare at waters that Lovecraft might have imagined, though he was so much further North. We watched inky wavelets and imagined tentacles and horrors in the deep. If we waited long enough, we could watch long legged water birds close as a natural history exhibit fish in the shallows while this luminous pastel light of a Chesapeake dawn bathed everything. It was a strange and delicate beauty to find in a town like a bubo in the armpit of the east coast.
Out here, it is all about salmon belly sunsets over water. Dawn is nothing. It wasn't much better back east. I have always lived with hills and trees that block what little of the sunrise there is. The one place I have seen a dawn that could compete aesthetically with the drama and flash of sunset was along a stretch of Maryland shore.
That summer I stayed behnd in Annapolis with a friend who would be an enemy before the next winter was out. Annapolis was like that for me just generally. Anyway, we explored the nooks and crannies of Annapolis by day and night, wandering far from campus by foot and by car to places Johnnies generally never went. Out where the houses of the rich abutted private docks and thin stretches of shore, there was a tiny overlook where one could pull over and stare at waters that Lovecraft might have imagined, though he was so much further North. We watched inky wavelets and imagined tentacles and horrors in the deep. If we waited long enough, we could watch long legged water birds close as a natural history exhibit fish in the shallows while this luminous pastel light of a Chesapeake dawn bathed everything. It was a strange and delicate beauty to find in a town like a bubo in the armpit of the east coast.
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Date: 2012-02-14 11:12 pm (UTC)Though -- it seems you may be speaking of sunrises, rather than dawn in toto. What is lovely is the hour before the sun crests the horizon. Steinbeck's 'Hour of the Pearl.' As you describe on the Chesapeake. The strange, pearly, pastel light, silvery but not metal-hard.
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Date: 2012-02-15 08:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-15 09:50 am (UTC)But The Hour of the Pearl is not an attention-grabber like a sunset
(The sunset’s a bird with wings made out of fire
Parking lots turn to gold as it glides across the sky
And every night from 6:00 to 6:05
The desert dirt shimmers like a sea of watermelon light)
it's subtle. If you're thinking about other shit, like how tired you are, or the day ahead of you, you'll miss it. But if you're paying attention, it is as Steinbeck says, a pearl, round and whole and weirdly eternal. "Time stops and examines itself."
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Date: 2012-02-16 06:41 am (UTC)