Welcome to Part III of Searching for The Real. Follow the links to read Part I, Part II, and An Intermission. As always, no AI was used in the crafting the words or images in this piece.
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1.
I pass through the sliding back doors and into the early morning where the moonlight catches the low mist. The field glows in this involuntary three-clock outing, the one instigated by the little dog—I call her “that little b-word” at these hours—who has some outside business to tend to.
She squats in the tall grass, and as she does, a howl breaks the silence, then a chorus of cackles. Coyotes.
In Goshen, the human population has grown more than eleven percent in the last four years, and the incursion of people into the country—and the resulting subdivisions— has pressured the local coyote population, pushing them inward. Now, they run the fields from the Goshen Community Building to Orthodox Brewery, and they’re always on the hunt. My property sits in the run.
Lucy—that little b-word—is taking some time, and the cackles seem to be moving in our direction. She looks over her shoulder and sidesteps into taller grass, but I tell her, “They’re a mile upwind, Lu.” She doesn’t understand because English is not her first language, and when she’s finished, she sprints for the back door. Her seven-pound frame would constitute a great morning snack for this pack of feral ghosts, and she knows as much. It’d be funny if she wasn’t tremoring when I hoist her up and return to bed.
2.
There are fresh bones in that field.
Weeks ago, a deer fell in my backyard, and my best guess is that it was gutshot by a poacher before running onto my property to die among the tall grass. Over the following days, the scavengers made use of the carcass. First the coyotes then the buzzards, red-tail hawks, and crows. Our puppy, Winnie, found the fallen deer and pulled a rib bone loose.
Animals—you cannot pry the primal urge to hunt from them. You cannot hide the smell of death from them. You cannot expect them to act as anything other than animals, driven by instinct, desire, and the madness of the hunt.
Humans—we’d like to believe we’re different.
3.
Amber’s brother has come to visit, and we meet at the celebrated Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. We walk the halls, stand in front of the paintings that catalogue the evolution of American creativity. We make some art of our own, too.
This is not my first outing to Crystal Bridges. The paintings are familiar, and some of them I know by name. But I round a corner, turn, and on the wall is a painting I’ve never seen before. It’s a painting by the famed painter whom art lovers know by a singular name—Whistler.
You’ve likely seen Whistler’s most famous painting, Whistler’s Mother, which captures the profile of a tallish, angular, Presbyterian-poster lady, sitting in a high-backed chair. But this painting—the one that’s grabbed me by the throat—is not that. It’s something more interpretive.
The title: Nocturne, The Solent. It’s a painting of three ships on the river at dusk. The colors are muted, washed out. There are pinpricks of light coming from ship lanterns that reflect off the water. In the background, a ghost ship is almost visible.
The placard to the right of the painting reads:
Preferring to highlight mood over narrative content, James McNeill Whistler found parallels between art and music and entitled his artworks accordingly, calling them compositions, harmonies, and nocturnes. His nocturnes are nighttime scenes, often painted in London—where he spent most of his adult life. Viewers are not meant to associate the paintings with a specific place, however. Whistler explained, “I wished to indicate an artistic interest alone… a nocturne is an arrangement of line, form and colour first.”
I stare at the work and as I do, I feel. The painting is of a different era, a different place, and yet, I know this light. It’s the waning light that softens everything—shapes, figures, faces, the day-long tensions of occupation. It’s the light of spent expectations. It’s the light of coming rest.
I consider Whistler’s work, how he painted in a time before the artificial. Before social media. Before artificial intelligence. Before a computer could spit out a “nocturne” in 3.5 nanoseconds. This was a work of study, contemplation, and imagination. How long did Whistler work the canvas? Weeks? Months? And he did it all without social affirmation, without knowing if it’d resonate with the crowd. He painted by instinct, betting on the fact that his instincts would resonate with the instincts of the eventual viewer.
On that canvas, the hunt. On it, the representation of instinct and execution. On it, The Real.
This simple composition—was it perfect? I’m not an art expert, so I’m not bold enough to make that claim. But as I examined Whistler’s choices, I thought about my own experiences here in the Ozarks. The finer moments of my life—particularly the moments I’m chasing The Real—are either nocturnes or aubades (dusk or dawn meditations). These dusk and dawn hours are the liminal spaces, the times when I break from the office grind, the frenetic hustle of making a living. These are the hours when I have time to explore the landscape of my home.
4.
In blue hour, I make my way to the field, the place where fresh death has turned to white bone. I examine the spent carcass, and I feel something of Whistler’s inspiration.
There was fear in those bones in a deer’s last moments. Then, there was a feast as the spent life of a doe fed a pack of coyote pups and a flock of carrion birds. Every wild thing—the coyotes, the buzzards, the red tail, my dogs, the clover and wild grass—was fed by those bones.
I consider the trespassing animals who ignored my deed, my boundaries. They were pulled to that field by what? An instinct? A hunger? That’s not quite it. The animals were moved by some invisible hand, one that existed long before our property lines were recorded in the county property records. That invisible hand will pull those animals into the field long after I’m gone, too. Pulled and pulled and pulled, world without end.
This is the realest thing I know to say.
And then, I collect the bones.
Your Nocturnes and Aubades
Nocturnes and aubades—they’re for all of us. In the days before publishing this piece, I asked my little Substack community this question: What marks the evenings and mornings in your neck of the woods? When you think of nocturne or aubade, what comes to mind?
Following are some of the responses.
: “There is a different stillness during the early dawn, before the sun rises over mountain ranges or woods. Even more particular are these moments at sea while crossing the ocean. Afterwards the wind shifts and waves moves more bravely.”Kate: “There is a daily rhythm that occurs every morning (unless it’s overcast). Looking out our west kitchen window, I watch the sunlight touch the tip top of the trees across our field. The light steadily moves down until it is illuminating all of each tree. It’s much how Lewis describes the effect of Aslan’s breath on the statues, bringing them to life. This movement of light dispersing the darkness thrills me every single time.”
: “The pink and orange hues in the dawn of winter’s sky catches my breath each morning this season in the busyness of corralling children out the door and into the car for school, or in the rush to an early coffee meeting. It’s there in the vivid color during the drive that I’m reminded of the potential of the day and always of hope that something new is around the corner. My kids notice it just for a moment in a comment or two, and then it’s out into symphonic chaos and clamor of car doors opening and shutting. But those few moments I relish.” (and the accompanying STELLAR photograph):“I have been in my house less than a year, so every season is still new here. As Autumn comes on I am noticing how the dawn comes later and later. I mark it by the hillside I can see from my window. In high midsummer it was often fully gilded by the risen sun when I rose. Now I am up in time to see the light creeping down it in the mornings. As to sunset, being high up means I can see a vast expanse of sky and sea by stepping outside and climbing the stairs to the top garden, so if I see some sunset, I try to go outside for the full spectacle. When I was a photographer I was very interested in these in-between lights, and in moonlight and starlight, and I made a lot of long exposures, such as this one, which is a self-portrait by moonlight: approximately a minute long exposure.”
:“Too often I lose the dawn to reading a book, or Substack, or poetry. I am loosely aware of birds nudging the day with their bright conversations, the neighbor's rooster bullying the morning, and his hens, but always startled looking up to find light where before it was darkness. Seeing frost dusted, curled edge leaves scattered below still bare trees, the white bark of the tri-trunked birch stark against perylene pines, I feel disappointed. Disappointed I missed the first lace of gold across the uppermost branches, again, and the pale silver blue day beginning-- but not overly so because there is coffee left in the pot and the warm feeling of beautiful words with their own kind of dawning.”
Now it’s your turn: What marks the evenings and mornings in your neck of the woods? When you think of nocturne or aubade, what comes to mind?
The Observationalist
In the spring of 2023, I began exploring the concept of visual language by creating a book of photos, poems, and short essays entitled The Observationalist. All proceeds are reinvested in the equipment I need to pursue more ideas like this. You can preview The Observationalist by following this link or clicking on the image below.
If you’ve enjoyed this post…
When I think of nocturnal and aubade, I immediately think of music. Classical. I used to drive a machine and would listen to Rock music all day. The problem was that they used to repeat the songs ad nauseam. So I switched to radio to Classical music. CBC FM. It was all the music I used to hear on Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies in the mornings when I was a kid. No kindergarten for me, no play school, it was all playing outside and "don't go to the river," which of course I did. But seeing that painting invokes different memories...of working on the river on the afternoon shift, watching the lights reflecting off the water from the farther shore.
There's a moment in late afternoon when the light on the mountains begins to shift. The snow on those mountains takes on first a pink hue as the sun starts its drop toward the horizon. The contrast with the dark trees is breathtaking. Nearly everything else is ignored during this time because this color display doesn't last. Within half an hour, that color has moved from a rosy pink, to a golden glow, and then faded to a lavender, before the sunlight disappears altogether for another day.