Still some distance from Pelee, the vast snow-laden farm-plains slip behind, and sparse dwellings accrete until they border both sides of the road, blotting up the white-on-blue.
Flitting between houses, the opaque white yonder also whittles out. Stolen glimpses of silvered sparks alight the south - the iced lake. Spangling in frosted stasis, innumerable light shards strewed over the frozen expanse through to the paled horizon.A Milky Way descended, glinting fiercer in sunlit white than midnight monochrome.
So this is where stars bask and repose, radiant.
The way south to the point extruding to the lake is barely touched by snow, sheltered on either side, unexpectedly, by trees staking a strong stand on a wisp of land so tenuous on the map. It is winter, so one may drive nearly out to the tip-point. An observation tower stands at the footpath’s start, but is of such heft and jarringness (an artifice foreign and irreducible) that it is an absurdity soon negated. (In a good sense, it does not intrude beyond its immediate position, for the eye is drawn away. An ascent is worthwhile in the perspective it gives) The brambling trees end abruptly, snow sidles into the sedate cerulean waters, hardly astir through to the soft-hued horizon.
Turning west, the tree veil recedes to reveal juxtaposing chaos. A continuous crest of massive ice-flats - shards of giant’s mirror, or a chandelier perhaps - each larger than a raft, piled-up and hedging the entire length of the windward shore. Caspar David Friedrich’s Polar Sea , in greater subtlety, alit and pristine.
Source & seen at: Hamburger Kunsthalle
It had not snowed since the morning, and the haphazardly angled ice-slats were flawlessly lucent. Ice of such scarce time, such youth, it has taken no colour of the world (and will never, here, accrue the time-density of glacial ethereal hue). The shore-shattered shards lay as a multitude of white down’d slates. What nature tosses up carelessly as flotsam we perceive in awe, and conceive in much diminished forms as aping lapidaries. The inhuman beauty, in its glassy denseness and brilliant intensity, envelopes and negates us.
With frost nipping nose and fingers, a hasty ascent up the tower for a parting shot.
Bibliography
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus trans. Justin O’Brien (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1973)
Macfarlane,Robert. Underland (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2019)
董其昌.various works. National Palace Museum. https://theme.npm.edu.tw/exh105/dongqichang/ch/index.html
Friedrich,Caspar David. Das Eismeer. Hamburger Kunsthalle https://www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de/die-kunst-ist-offentlich-deutsch