Weather
Last year fall happened in a day. This year is different. There’s been a gradual buildup of brown around the edges, but for the most part everything is staying intact. The weather has been in the mid-eighties, and from what I’ve told it takes a cold snap to make the leaves turn. Moving to Arkansas from California, I’ve become pretty fascinated by the process of change. There are really only two seasons in California— hot, then cool and foggy.
I never knew why my father (from Oklahoma, originally) watched the weather report constantly. In California, you can predict the weather in month-long blocks, and in two regions, north and south. In Arkansas, you measure it in minutes, and often, you can hardly predict it over the space of a few blocks let alone a whole town. I think my father's consciousness about the weather was not due to his aspirations of being a farmer, but a deeper subtext of geographic outlook. In the midwest, the weather can kill you.
Fall started to blow in today, in the form of a cold front. It was cloudy this afternoon and a bit muggy when I drove to school. I was only there for about a half-hour, and then it started to sprinkle. As I walked to my car, it started to pick up in intensity. I had just made it when the sky ripped open and started to pour. The tall gutters filled up, and the streets looked like rivers. For about three blocks that is. As I got to the freeway, less than a couple miles away, the streets were barely wet. When I exited the freeway two miles later, the ground was completely dry and there wasn’t a trace of moisture. This lasted for a bit, but the ground near my apartment was wet too, but not soaked. Microclimates in action. When I went back for my night class, the temperature had dropped by twenty degrees, there was a strong wind blowing and I thought about how much I love wind, and change. I’ve got to drive somewhere this weekend, because I’m sure that the hillsides will be a brilliant amber and orange and red. It doesn’t last long, but it’s such a ferocious reminder of this process of renewal.
Driving home, I was thinking about the fairly elegant model I constructed for myself to explain Coleridge’s theory of primary and secondary imagination. I wish I could do this with the theories I’m reading now, but they are far too complex. But then, I sort of revised the model in a way I hadn’t before.
Simply put, we create a sphere around ourselves as our perception reaches out. However, for a body to find “rest” there must be another force which is equal to it pressing back. That force according to Coleridge is God; you can substitute whatever concept of “ultimate reality” you want. The interface, or boundary of that sphere is primary imagination— what we call “reality.” The secondary imagination, or poetic power, operates at this boundary acting to sort of tear off bits of that ultimate reality and synthetically combine them with our own internal reality to create something both of us, and beyond us.
The weather made me think: if we are reaching beyond that primary border (or interface) with things outside ourselves when we create, then perhaps we aren’t at rest at all inside our sphere. The “artistic” temperament must be restless and churning, pushing against that big freaking bubble of “reality” that we are all trapped within, otherwise, how can we ever reach beyond? An artistic consciousness can never be at rest.
