George Inness: October Noon (1891)

Gallery Text
Blurred, softly painted, and almost otherworldly, October Noon differs markedly from the realistic, crisply rendered American landscapes that hang nearby, such as Bierstadt’s magisterial view of the Rockies. Though Inness probably based this scene on the flat, marshy terrain near his New Jersey studio, his image retreats from hard facts and recognizable places to suggest a peaceful, imagined, or dimly remembered landscape. Formally evocative of work from the French Barbizon School, Inness’s quiet paintings found favor among New York patrons overwhelmed by the rumble of the new modern city. As one New York critic put it, “Now and then [Inness] has a picture of perfect peace. . . . It tranquilizes the soul even to look upon it.”

" … a heretic in Rome …"

Creating mémoire inevitably involves some MisRemembering. Dates, places, and sequences aren't always stored in recoverable order, and even short-term memory might prove unreliable. Still, it's a genuine shock whenever I discover that I've gone and done it again, presenting some fiction as representing what actually happened. The Muse usually serves up my undoing, for she has often been a witness or co-participant, and her memory might disagree with mine. Through such disassembly, the story might straighten, leaving me feeling at least temporarily crooked. But MisRemembering's no actual sin. It's more like a part of the price for engaging in remembering, with no way of escaping. The sin lies in the more deliberate DisRemembering, intentionally burnishing the facts, often to enhance the author's reputation. Every writer is probably capable of committing this sin. What matters might be how they respond to being outed.

I MisRemembered key elements of two recent stories, TheMove and SettlingIn. I MisRemembered the date we moved into Takoma Park and inadvertently invented instead of simply reporting. We did not move into the Sherman Street house on July 1, 2009, but on July 5. This slight difference nudged out what happened on that critical July 4, our first Independence Day after being Exiled, and a pivotal part of our story. The Muse reminded me that she had been out of town just before we moved, and that fact also held an important part of our tale.

Almost immediately after The Muse took the job that took us into Exile, her supervisor, who lived in Colorado and had little idea of what it meant to take a job in the DC bureaucracy, began micro-managing her actions. She'd order her to do stuff that made no sense and couldn't be realistically done. In the supervisor's defense, she was an inexperienced supervisor. She'd collaborated with the woman previously holding the job Amy acquired. That woman had contracted cancer and quickly became debilitated, then died right around the time The Muse started. The inept supervisor had committed herself to continuing her former colleague's legacy, which meant she would have to micro-manage The Muse's movements. The Muse caught on quickly, but the intrusions still wounded us both, creating foreboding over our fresh Exile.

The week before we moved, The Muse had traveled back to Colorado to meet with HR to report her concerns about her overbearing boss. Her meeting had been successful, though it would take some weeks to reassign the overseer and resolve the difficulty. The Muse was held blameless, and it seemed, when we finally moved in, that we might be able to tolerate our new situation after all. We attended the neighborhood 4th of July potluck before we had moved in, our benefactor neighbor Clair introducing us around. We were still prospective neighbors then, so we felt uncomfortable and alien and unable to remember anyone's name; we were so out of context. We stayed briefly before returning to our final night in Rosslyn in our temporary high-rise apartment.

Over the prior few months, almost since we'd arrived, The Muse had been inviting two fellow ex-pats over for Sunday night suppers by the pool out back. There, she began absorbing the stories that would eventually enable her to assimilate into that alien culture effectively. This proved an essential element of our early Exile days, for life in the DC bureaucracy does not come with operating instructions. One of those guests was a special assistant to some cabinet secretary who seemed to know everybody in the administration personally. He was a font of helpful information. He'd encouraged The Muse to make a formal report on her supervisor's abuse and counseled her in a thousand little intricacies intended to ease her entry into the bureaucracy.

That final night, though, we were on our own, looking down the nose at Washington DC's primary holiday, the Fourth of July. Any visit to our National Mall should suggest our national religion to the visitor. While our state has always been constitutionally separate from any established church, our Mall features examples of our civic sanctuaries. From the U. S. Grant Civil War frieze at the foot of Capitol Hill to the Lincoln Memorial at the other end, stand one after another memorial to our wars. These might represent our nation's sanctioned religion, for we seem to worship our conflicts: victories and also defeats. Our soldiers' many sacrifices seem sacred and hardly secular. The Vietnam Memorial lies across the Reflecting Pool from the Korean War's, and both just down from the then newly-consecrated WWII memorial. It's considered criminal not to worship with patriotism there. Further, just beyond Lincoln's Memorial lies the Arlington Bridge, on the opposite side of which lies the old Robert E. Lee plantation overlooking Washington, which an enterprising bureaucrat in the Lincoln Administration designated Arlington National Cemetary, the most sacred ground in greater DC.

Our temporary apartment was situated just a few blocks from that cemetery, which was also reported to be the best place to watch the largest fireworks display in the country. Later that evening, we made our way into the largest crowd I'd ever experienced. There was scarcely any place to stand and certainly no place to sit. The Grand Otter, accompanying us, couldn't see a thing from her perspective. We stood near the Iwo Jima Memorial and mostly listened to the noise. We couldn't see very much of the display. Having been designated a Conscientious Objector during the Vietnam era, I'd never felt very comfortable practicing patriotism, our national religion. I was more the sort who'd flee behind the garage and hold my hands over my ears when the fireworks started. Rockets’ red glaring scares rather than inspires me.

On that eve before finally moving into DC, I received a cautionary experience, one that scared the living shit out of me. I would be moving into the belly of that beast, the center of the so-called land of the free and the brave, but I felt neither there. I felt trapped in a hostile environment, where some petty government bureaucrat had been harassing my Muse and where I clearly didn't yet belong. The next morning, we'd finally move in after several delays caused, if I remember correctly, by the contentious tenants who were vacating the place as part of a divorce. Not only were we Exiled, but we would inescapably be inheritors of legacies we had little interest in possessing. Me, a heretic in Rome, and The Muse, a competent bureaucrat still in the making. That last Independence Day evening before finally moving in didn't feel very much like freedom.

Sorry for the MisRemembering earlier. It will reoccur.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz