Sitting in church this afternoon, I was reminded by the light entering the windows at the base of Beacon Hill rising over the Common that I am beckoned south and west. Generally. Without doubt, I am sometimes beckoned east, sometimes north. In Chicago, I am pulled both west and east, the former out to the prairie and the grassy hills, the latter out over the lake and into Michigan. In cases of being beckoned north, this often has to do with the western light, and sometimes with cloudy weather, mostly in winter but at times and for different reasons in the summer. In winter, the western light, in late afternoon, recalls the crisp air of the northern hills where we took long weekends as children and plowed through sixteen inches of snow on our way to play on these wooded knolls. Here the western light streamed easily through the barren trees where my brother and sister and I dug in the snow and played innovative little games. When the cloudy winter light settles I am sometimes beckoned north, in recollection of that magnificent grey landscape on the same long weekends where we drove subtle curved paths through orchards and woods on our way to ski trails and country diners and sometimes haunts. In summer I am beckoned north as well, but again due to the western light, which brings vivid impressions of late afternoons when the air finally dries out and the insects settle back into the wood save the tiny bugs that hang in the air stubbornly like gumps, and when the lake water begins to cool and the hum of boat motors die down and the world and catydids are turned over to crickets and slightly breezes that come from nowhere but the stuff of night itself. Occassionally, I will be beckoned toward the north and east in both summer and winter as a result of the eastern light which is in essence (and essence) the western light minus the angles of incidence that otherwise would make it equally vibrant. the eastern light has a way in both winter and summer of morphing the landscape into the sky, blurring and erasing the horizon line or the tree line in a singular palette. Here, the moon is most silver(-set-against-blue). The same eastern light beckons me east across the horizonless lake on Chicago summer evenings. As though the city were silent save a slow-rendered soundtrack, the gnats and bugs are flickering head and brake lights up the avenue, the dotted glows of windows and the planes flying overhead, blinking red and white, into Midway and O'Hare. Time moves at a rate less than 1, the foot feels no concrete but rather a mere ground, the air is devoid of breeze and weight. Just the silent music of photons creating the western light beckoning you east, highlighting the bellies of planes and softening the textures of tree and brick, upending the road and pulling the horizon up along the dome of the sky, wrapping it up back into the sky where it fades into intensity to west at your back. One has the sense of watching pure life, without identifying names and places, objects and species. Plane is gnat is oak is brake light is stone is water is street is dome is sky is person is eye is light is west is east is north is south. Is then is now is winter is summer is hill and plain and house and forest and adult and child and teenager and geezer. When time moves at less than 1, the rest seems to accelerate, warp and collapse into a stream rushing by as you face east, west, south, north...
Chanson: TNT, His Second Story Island
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