Blue Sky

Fifteen years ago I started a blog post on Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet by explaining that I had just joined Twitter.

Encouraged by Geoff Manaugh's defence of the practice, I have followed the example of some of my favourite blogs and started a Some Landscapes twitter (not sure I've mastered the idiom yet, can the word be used as a noun like 'blog'?) The idea is to include a few quick quotes and links and comments as they arise - some will get incorporated in later posts here, others won't. The 140 character constraint is a challenge to write with almost Flaubertian concision. Here's the sort of thing I've twittered: One of Flaubert's 'Accepted Ideas' - 'Landscapes (painted): always look like a mess of spinach.'

Everyone knows the story of the rise and fall of Twitter, with many people lamenting 'the golden days' when connections could be made and online friendships form through mutual shared interests. I have not been able to bring myself to post on it since last year. I briefly tried Threads but nobody seemed to be on it, although a few nature writers and cultural commentators have nailed their colours to its mast and occasionally encourage its use as an alternative to 'X'. I thought Bluesky seemed much more promising - a bit less mainstream with fewer trolls and likely to be used by interesting people not necessarily after as many likes as possible. That has proved to be the case but only in a limited way - disappointingly some of the people I first met through Twitter started accounts there last year but haven't really been using them. Anyway, we'll see - as someone said recently, it took Twitter a while to take off.

As this blog is beyond the reach of X I can safely encourage you here to join Bluesky and follow me there, andrew-ray, if you want some old school 'tweets' on landscape and the arts. I do Instagram too but that's just for my own photos. I should probably reiterate that my job prevents me from ever mentioning my political views or government policy on social media, but that's OK as I'd rather focus on things like Northern Renaissance landscape painting anyway (see my previous post here). This morning I've put this quote up on Bluesky which I found in an old notebook - and as I type this I've just got a 'like' from the excellent Longbarrow Press, although I don't anticipate too many more!

A Swedish explorer had all but completed a written description in his notebook of a craggy headland with two unusually symmetrical valley glaciers, the whole of it a part of a large island, when he discovered what he was looking at was a walrus.’ - Barry Lopez on mirages in Arctic Dreams

Probably one reason I like the idea of Bluesky is its name (Threads, by contrast reminds me of that terrifying eighties drama about a nuclear holocaust). I was intrigued to see how many times I had used the words "blue sky" on this blog so I did a ctrl-F. The first thing that comes up are two quotes from J. A. Baker's The Peregrine, from near the start and near the end of that book's freezing cold winter: 

• October 14th: One of those rare autumn days, calm under high cloud, mild, with patches of distant sunlight circling round and rafters of blue sky crumbling into mist...
• February 10th: This was a day made absolute, the sun unflawed, the blue sky pure...

The Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer who I wrote about after he won the Nobel Prize, describes the end of winter in 'Noon Thaw'. The world has a new language: 'the vowels were blue sky and the consonants were black twigs and the speech was soft over the snow.'

Here is George Eliot in The Mill on the Floss describing the simple pleasures of an English landscape in spring.

The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white star-flowers and the blue-eyed speedwell and the ground ivy at my feet - what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home-scene?

Sussex-based poet and clergyman Andrew Young once compared thistledown to 'ghosts of day ... silver against blue sky.'

A century earlier, Eugène Delacroix was looking up through the trees.

Champosay, 27 October 1853 Went for a stroll in the garden and then stood for a long time under the poplars at Baÿvet; they delight me beyond words, especially the white poplars when they are beginning to turn yellow. I lay down on the ground to see them silhouetted against the blue sky with their leaves blowing off in the wind and falling off about me.

The beauty of forms silhouetted in this way was something I observed myself in Rome and mentioned in connection with Walter Benjamin's description of Heidelberg Castle ('Ruins jutting into the sky can appear doubly beautiful on clear days ...')

The sky can also been seen in water: here is Ruskin on Canaletto's Venice:

It is one of the most difficult things in the world to express the light reflection of the blue sky on a distant ripple, and to make the eye understand the cause of the colour, and the motion of the apparently smooth water, especially where there are buildings above to be reflected, for the eye never understands the want of the reflection.

And in Florence, from A Room with a View  in E. M. Forster's novel, you could look down and see river men, children, soldiers and a tram temporarily unable to proceed.

Over such trivialities as these many a valuable hour may slip away, and the traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it.

There is a blue sky visible from my own window now.