russe

DUST LIGHT, LEAVES

Above autumn's burgundy
and rust,
beyond the orange groves
chafing and ruddy in the frost,
a cloud lifts into blue . . .

the west goes up all haydust, flame,
and the flat land glimmers
out to it on the day-stream--
it is Millet's sky of "The Angelus,"

that nine- teenth century sky
we have only in paintings
and in these few still moments
in their rose and amber rags.

As a child, I remember this . . .
standing on the creek stones,
dusk moving over the fields
like a ship's hull pulling away

with that first sense of loss
and release; I saw it was
all about the beginning of dust
rising into the long sky's seam.
into my own two eyes and hands.

A chalk-white moon overhead
and to the right, umber waves
of sparrows back and through
the empty trees . . .

Soon, stars will draw analogies
in the dark, but now the world
is simple as the dead leaves
glowing in this late hour,

simple as our desire
to rise lucent as clouds
in their camisoles of dust,
the cool air burning though us

over leaves drifting on a pond,
over the last memory
of ourselves looking up,
stunned as a carp blinking at the light.

Christopher Buckley

(this whole exploration in hue began when i noticed, in the metropolitan museum's collection, the oddly matching color schemes of the (at top) dagobert peche textile and the callot soeurs gown. i am not sophisticated in color theory, but i poked around until sense seemed to begun being made. the ballet russe had a tremendous influence on design in the first quarter of the twentieth century. how those became the colors of the ballet russe, and how these same colors came to become circulated around the western world, i do not know. but know that matisse as well as bakst designed their costumes, then carried the language of their colors into the world.)

i assume people have always communicated through their clothing. today, whether it's ex- plicit (a slogan t-shirt), a 'uni- form' (waitress, gang member, frat boy, dyke), or only just subtle enough for the elite to understand (signs of status).

but i haven't been able to come up with another example of a culture who did so as widely and specifically as have the japanese. (can you?)

The use of family crests for identifica- tion and decoration became popular during the Kamakura period (1185–1333). Many of these miniature masterpieces were based on plants and animals and are still in use and understood today. Originally their apparent simplicity was a ‘visual’ shorthand for a complex sequence of ideas known to a select few. This shared secrecy and playfulness (often based on puns) greatly enhanced their appeal. Depiction by suggestion is a recurring theme in Japanese art. 1

i can see that hav- ing a pict- orial lang- uage as well as a tradition, for example, of having crests for families as well as flora, fauna, and more, may have predicated japan's highly symbolic textiles, but i can't see why the west had so little. at least, once we saw these patterns, we embraced them--though devoid, of course, of 'secrecy,' 'playfulness,' and meaning. but not without delight.