March 29, 2006
WednesdayÂ
I celebrate myself, and sing myself . . .
        — Walt Whitman, 1819-1892
            American poet
It’s happened again, just like last year, and the year before that, not all of the years but many of them in a life now entered its sixtieth year. I fall into a funk sometime after the first rush of the new year’s energy has faded. I have a tendency toward Seasonal Affective Disorder, a sensitivity to the amount and quality of natural light that one experiences during the winter months.
It’s that “certain slant of light” Emily Dickinson talked about, that she said gave her “heavenly hurt.” I live somewhere around 45° North latitude, and I can sometimes feel changes in my attitude as early as Thanksgiving. I have never experienced a depression so severe that I could not function at all, although in the mid-1970s I was pretty close to that. I went to work every day and paid my bills and kept up the appearance of a normal life, but alone at home I slept and cried a lot. There hasn’t been anything even close to that for a long time, but most years there’s at least some period when I experience fuzzy thinking, lack of energy, and inability to focus on the things I know I want to do.
In December I wrote about last February’s trip to New York to see The Gates, a temporary installation of orange flags that flapped above the heads of people walking through Central Park. It’s what snapped me out of last year’s funk. This year didn’t seem to be so bad, but something definitely was dragging at me.
On March 5, four days before my birthday, I visited the National Gallery in Washington with the same group I’d gone to New York with last year. The attraction was a special exhibit of the work of Paul Cezanne to commemorate the centenary of his death. I enjoyed that immensely. I also spent a long time in front of Asher Durand’s Kindred Spirits, an iconic painting beloved by American Studies types like me.
But it was the time I spent wandering through the more modern work in the museum’s East building that left the most lasting impression. Among the things I saw were many of Mark Rothko’s huge works, his signature rectangles of luminescent color that seem to float above the canvas. They took me down into a memory and a memory and a memory, and reminded me of all the possibilities that are mine.
I bought a postcard of the painting shown at left and tucked it into my notebook. And I forgot about it. Until yesterday, when I picked that book up, feeling that there was something missing, something I wasn’t paying enough attention to, something I wanted to get back to. It fell out, and suddenly something seemed to crack open in my head.
In December I wrote:
Orange is my daughter’s favorite color, although it’s never been mine. Orange has always seemed so loud and so aggressive. I prefer muted pastels, colonial blues and mauves, quiet colors, mousey even. Lynn is perhaps the strongest, most socially confident 20-year-old you’ll ever meet.
She makes friends easily, treats those she loves with care and attention, is loyal, trustworthy, dependable, and thrifty, clean, and brave as well. I looked at those flags that day and saw her smile in them, saw her spirit in their flutter, in their dance with the wind. Something in me lifted. Something in me said, you can rise above whatever darkness is holding you back.
It wasn’t really so dark this winter. But it was cloudy. I took a deep breath yesterday morning, raised my eyes, and saw the first yellow buds on the tangle of winter-gray forsythia branches that mark the edge of our property. I spent all day taking stock of where I was with my online writing, and getting started again.
For Walt Whitman, the flag of his disposition was the grass, “of hopeful green stuff woven.” My flag is orange. Thanks for being here to watch it wave.
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