February 19, 2007

My friends from Amherst (most of them from the class of 1977), inspired -- or repulsed -- by my visage on the cover of the new issue of Amherst, our alumni magazine, have been spending the day sending e-mails, trying to come up with "thought bubbles" for what I'm supposedly thinking...

In any event, I'm grateful that Emily Boutillier, the magazine's new editor, and Molly Lyons, the writer of the article, were so generous in their praise of Watching the World Change...and that photographer Frank Ward chose such a forgiving image. Even if I do look like I'd feel more comfortable on the cover of Maryknoll Missioner.

In any event, the mailbag...

Donaugh Brennan, from Dublin, e-mailed...

In [a] recent post I noticed that you attribute the 'prime green' of the title of Robert Stone's memoir to the "iridescent hue of the dawn's first rays, sometimes glimpsed by Stone after a night of hallucinogenic ingestion in the company of Kesey's clan."

That is perhaps how Stone attributes it, but I experienced the phenomena while watching the sun set one summer evening in Mayo in the West of Ireland. My partner and I, as we sat there with our eyes fixed rigidly on the horizon, hadn't ingested any hallucinogens, unfortunately.

However, we were looking out specifically for the 'green ray', which manifested itself moments before the last rays of sunlight winked out over our view of the Atlantic, because we'd been inspired to so by Eric Romer sublime film 'Le Rayon Vert'. At least I think we saw it. It could have been a delusion of the weird dusky light, eye strain and well, wishful thinking.

All the best,
Donagh

NOTE: I can't vouch for Donagh's taste. While he has an insightful Web site, I loathe Rohmer's The Green Ray--a wispy, verbose cinematic trifle.

But while we're on the subject, Donagh, I'm just finishing Robert Stone's stunning 60s memoir, Prime Green. Of the fleeting emerald epiphany, Stone writes, with his characteristic transcendence and facility:

"People who live in the tropics sometimes claim to have seen a gorgeous green flash spreading out from the horizon just after sunset on certain clear evenings. Maybe they have. Not I. What I will never forget is the greening of the day at first light on the shores north of [Mexico's] Manzanillo Bay. I imagine that color so vividly that I know, by ontology, that I must have seen it. In the moments after dawn, before the sun had reached the peaks of the sierra, the slopes and valleys of the rain forest would explode in green light, erupting inside a silence that seemed barely to contain it. When the sun's rays spilled over the ridge, they discovered dozens of silvery waterspouts and dissolved them into smoky rainbows. Then the silence would give way, and the jungle noises rose to blue heaven. Those mornings, day after day, made nonsense of examined life, but they made everyone smile. All of us, stoned or otherwise, caught in the vortex of dawn, would freeze in our tracks and stand to, squinting in the pain of the light, sweating, grinning. We called that ligh Prime Green; it was primal, primary, primo.

"The high-intensity presence of Mexico was inescapable. Even in the barrancas of the wilderness you felt the country's immanence. Poverty, formality, fatalism, and violence seemed to charge even uninhabited landscapes. I was young enough to rejoice in this..."

From a MySpace devotee...

This reader tells visitors to her MySpace page that she's currently reading my book, The Meaning of Life: Reflections in Words and Pictures on Why We Are Here.

From Teuvo Lehti, a Finnish retiree, serious amateur photographer, and former United Nations employee now living in France, who sent this image he took in 2000….

PHOTO BY TEUVO LEHTI