What's In View

This is my favorite view of Little Rock: up river, looking down at the bend. One of my best experiences ever in writing was writing a letter describing this view. I was on the back porch at my Grandfather's, farther down the hill by the river, writing to a friend. Even now, when I'm on his back porch, or looking out the window of his club, I'll repeat a phrase I used to describe that view, "se nicher dans un tournant du fleuve." Roughly translated it means "nestled in a bend in the river." I'm not really sure that phrase functions in French. I've never read it or heard it said that way. So it's quite possible I made it up and it doesn't quite work. Perhaps "se nicher" is not really the verb to use, and perhaps it should be "se nicher au tournant du fleuve, as opposed to "dans." Plus for whatever reason when I repeat it from the letter I don't conjugate verb but leave it as a present indicative participle, like a state of being not localized in time. But all this matters less to me. Or rather, I don't really want to know how it is said. I like the fact that I made it up and I made it up in a language that wasn't English. It makes that view mine more, in a way, I feel like, described in a language not English but perhaps not quite French either. And repeating it to myself, "se nicher dans un tournant du fleuve," has become a shorthand, standing by one of those windows, of that perfect experience. The view is that perfect morning, and that perfect morning is still my reference for this view.

It seems a little old fashioned in a way, something that panned out having particular significance. It feels as though in my own age the small object, the particular, the minute, the mundane even is the trigger for reflection, or nostalgia, or the accretion of identity. It is an old concept. Proust made it famous in a modern context with his madeleines. But my own generation seems to have made a habit of the quirky particular. Like the hero of Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated, the baubles from which he puts together a life. The way music is often a showcase of a thousand different nods. Or the way artists bore in on the particular, their attempts to get right in on top of things, right in on cities, focusing even on textures, taking inspiration from flotsam. But a whole view, a whole city from a distance... I'm sure it's still done but it reminds me of nothing so much as Dutch cityscapes, which is a pretty dated reference. And maybe my own age feels that that sort of view is too generalizing, telling you too little about what it is like to be on the street. And the Dutch ended up taking you inside. Their own cityscapes weren't enough of a capture of human experience. They wanted you looking at those individuals on their porches or at their writing desks, or even nose to nose with their food stuffs, their game hanging from pegs on the wall, their wine in glass bottles. There is something about the particular that is revelatory. I suppose that has always been the case. I don't think cityscape competes much really. But it does speak to us of something - panned out vision - it is just hard to carry around. Say a certain view from an escarpment of rock was wonderful to take in, but you can't put it in your pocket. Photographs are incomplete. You could pick up a rock from it. My sister would pick up a rock from it, or scoop the dust from some sandy beach into an envelope. Photographs are incomplete. They give you no sense of envelopment. Whereas something small and concrete you can hold in your hand. But a landscape is never separate from you; you are always in it, looking out over it. It envelops you in a way photographs will never capture and so photographs are an incomplete record of it. Maybe the only reason I love that view is language. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but in this case a few words, "se nicher..." etc, are much better than a picture at recapturing a view. (Maybe it helps to that the language is foreign to me and so ambiguous enough to encompass more than what it actually says.) Maybe the Dutch were trying to envelop you with those early cityscapes, and finding it insufficient to the task excelled at boring in close with their genre scenes and their still lifes. Maybe the cityscape will never fully conquer art because the medium is incomplete, unequal to the task. Maybe language is our best hope to hold on, for ourselves, to a view.