Bending the Light
In a Pennsylvania backwater of my memory, there is a specific bend in the road I often find myself revisiting. It is the quintessential pastoral scene: a dirt path lined by forest on one side and a split-rail fence on the other, a few languid cows in the distance, chewing on tall grasses in the meadow. It is quiet in this seldom-traveled place.
The road ascends slightly before disappearing into the dark mouth of the forest. From this vantage point, I know I would be heading away from my father’s usual fishing hole that is somewhere just behind me, down toward the Grange Hall at the end of the lane. I can feel the heat of a summer day weighing on my skin, but I can’t seem to conjure the fishing hole or any other part of the road. Just this particular spot remains, everything beyond that curve falling out of frame.
Whenever I encounter a replica of this scene in my present-day life, I always snap a photo, as if to pluck the image from somewhere in time and hold it in my hands. As if I might relive it. And every time I take this picture, my husband asks me: Why?
I have no good reason. What imprints itself on us is, at times, ineffable. I only know I feel compelled to find that place again, that moment in time, impossible as the task may be.
~
Obsession and artistic impulse are often intertwined. French Impressionist painter Claude Monet could attest to the truth of this. He made countless studies of haystacks and water lilies, of views of the Seine, capturing subtle variations of his subjects over time. But it was his devotion to rendering the Rouen Cathedral in Normandy that threatened to unravel him. Over the course of two years, he produced 30 paintings of the building’s façade, portraying it in every imaginable light and weather condition. “I am a prisoner,” he is reported to have written about this work, “and I must go on until the end.”
Monet’s fixation stemmed from the cathedral’s mutability, how it was transformed by a play of light, by changing conditions in the skies. It was this light that he ultimately aimed to capture, the only force capable of shapeshifting the otherwise immovable, ancient stones.
I think of Monet whenever I attempt to revisit that Pennsylvania scene with my camera lens. Like him, I am prisoner to a subject, though I am drawn not to mutability but to constancy. My winding path never changes. A dirt road is a dirt road, and a split-rail fence always looks the same, whether it’s made of Appalachian black locust or Northwest cedar. Each image is cast in a mold, a place I can recognize no matter where my travels might take me. But that is human nature. The brain likes the familiar, constructs reality by filling in its blind spots, its continents and oceans, reconstructing images to serve as a kind of simulacrum of home.
~
Was it also a sense of home that Monet sought in his work, a sense of familiarity? With my eye in the viewfinder of my camera, I wonder: What was his envisioned end for his study of the Rouen cathedral? Did he intend to paint until two canvasses reflected the same image, thus revealing the true nature of the structure? Or did he intend to paint until the stones themselves eroded from the background, reduced to sand beneath his easel, while only the light remained?
~
On a recent visit to my childhood home, I found myself taking photographs of things that no longer existed: the vacant field where my junior high school once stood, an empty pasture that had been home to a weathered old barn I used to explore as a teenager. I had curated a gallery of negative space, though what positive space might look like, I couldn’t say. All photographs capture loss, after all, are mere depictions of things as they once were, not as they are. Such is the case in painting as well. Monet’s cathedral was never real for more than a moment, the façade always shifting, so much so that he claimed to work on 14 canvasses at once in order to capture those elusive changes in mood brought on by the drifting clouds. Fourteen cathedrals built by light.
Which should I trust is the true depiction of reality: my memory of what once resided in those negative spaces in my photographs, or the negative spaces themselves? In which light is Monet’s cathedral the purest exemplar of its form?
In reviewing my gallery of empty spaces, this truth emerges: memory alone rivals light in its powers of transformation. Where you will see wild roses growing along the roadside of that old farmstead I so loved, I will see a field of ghosts.
~
One summer, when I was barely twenty, I took an hours-long detour on a road trip of some kind just to go to Pennsylvania and photograph the road from my memory, so strong was the pull of the space. What might have compelled me at that age to journey there? Was it that Welsh sense of hiraeth, a longing for a home we can no longer revisit? Possibly. But what can a young person know of nostalgia? Perhaps that space was the one real thing I have ever encountered in my life.
Twenty years later, the image I took is more layered with things unseen: the boy I played with along the path has died, the Grange Hall has closed, and no one fishes in that deep creek anymore.
The weather has changed on me.
~
Perhaps Monet felt a certain allure in the contrasts of his cathedral, felt both comforted by its steady presence and thrilled by its constant evolution in the shifting winds. In this way, we are kindred. I still feel drawn to what lies just out of view on that old dirt road, am still held captive by the idea of the place, even though I know nothing waits for me around that bend anymore.
Sometimes I will look at that photo and imagine I am setting off with my father, my fishing pole slung over my shoulder without a care. In those moments, I want to disappear out of frame and make a study of what lies beyond, past the seen and the unseen, to try to capture the truth of it.
In my mind, I walk. I walk until I find myself deep in the forest and remain until I discover what has always kept me on the periphery of that space. But I must go on until the end.
So I walk on further until I reach a clearing, walk and walk until I am able to detect a subtle change in the light.
References
Riding, Alan. “Monet's Fixation on the Rouen Cathedral.” New York Times. August 15, 1995. Accessed digitally: https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/15/arts/monet-s-fixation-on-the-rouen-cathedral.html.
For fun, I had Chat GPT critique this essay for me. See how the process unfolded here.