This should have been painted
I knelt down, slid up the glass pane, rested my forearms on the sill, stuck my head out the window of our second-story apartment, and took deep breaths of the fresh morning air while surveying the backyard.
Everywhere, the dew glistened in the early orange sun. The leaves trembled after a long night spent holding droplets in their upturned palms. One leaf fell, colliding with branches on its way down, finally alighting gently on the grass. Branches of the lemon tree sagged; a few of the lemons were almost touching the ground. The birdbath was half-filled with last week’s rain. A flying bug hovered like a hummingbird above one of the bushes. The elusive black-and-white cat must have been somewhere, stalking its breakfast.
I saw all of this and, as I do when something starts to seem like it might be beautiful, began to write.
But now—looking up at the backyard and back down at what I’ve written—I judge that I’m not quite “getting it” with my words. I don’t immediately understand why, other than a vague sense that prose is, for some reason, an ill-suited art form to capture and convey the beauty of the backyard.
Perhaps because there is just too much: dozens of trees, hundreds of branches and thousands of leaves on each of them; millions of specks of dirt on the ground; the birdbath, the bug, the cat; and light, in countless combinations of different angles and varying brightness, throughout all of it.
There is too much, yes. But too much of what? Too much detail, I think. Too many features. Too many particulars, specifics. Now it starts to come back to me, as I remember that I have experienced this before. I know what the problem is. My perspective is too wide, too far away. I have to focus.
But where? I ask myself. Where exactly in the backyard is the beauty coming from? What, in the first place, inspired the sense of beauty in me? Go there! Find that!
So I search, like a single in a bar, for the beauty in the backyard. Is it the leaves? No, too abundant. Is it the dew? No, too cliché. Is it the cat? No, I can’t even find the cat.
As I sleuth around to each suspect, I focus in like a scientist with a sample under a microscope and then mull it over like a sommelier with a mouthful of wine. But the samples are all dormant and each mouthful is even more lifeless than the last.
Aha! I realize: I am searching for the needle, but the haystack is what I want. I need to feed the steeds, not sew a sweater! I need the whole pie, not just a piece.
The beauty isn’t coming from just one particular part—the leaves, the dew, or the cat. It really is the whole backyard being beautiful. All of it, working together in codependent unison somehow.
Like cooking a meal. If you only put a pinch of oregano on your tongue, eat a spoonful of dry flour, drink some tomato sauce, or take a bite of cold mozzarella, you will not, from any of the individual ingredients, get the taste of pizza.
The plentiful leaves, the platitudinal dew, the still-absent cat—they were all fine just the way they were, as ingredients. But I forgot to turn on the oven. I forgot to mix the dough and set it out to rise.
If I would have combined the ingredients and written them together as a cohesive dish, then a reader might have been able to take a bite of the backyard and taste something like “a breath of fresh air in the morning” or “a morsel of the natural world in a city of concrete and metal”—but these are only short and trivial phrases, and they are too little, too late.
Earlier, I said that I must focus. I was wrong. I said it because it is something I have experienced before with my writing—when I have been inspired by something specific, proceeded to write it, but then begun to drift wide from it, floated above it, and ended up generalizing. In this case, it seems generalization was the right way to go. I don’t know. I’ve talked in circles.
Now I am thinking the backyard scene should have just been painted. Because it was an experience of sight. It was quiet in the morning. All I could taste was the faint remnant of toothpaste in my mouth. All I could smell was the crisp air. My only physical feelings were my knees on the hardwood and my forearms on the sill.
It was my eyes that were sensing the beauty. Not my ears, my mouth, my nose, or any other feeling part of my body. In order to communicate the beauty of the backyard to someone else, I needed them to see what I was seeing.
I should have phoned my painter friend from the start and waited for him to ring the doorbell and invited him up the stairs and said to him, kneel down here, rest your forearms on the sill, stick your head out the window. Now, do you see it? Okay, so I am not crazy. Well, can you paint it? Good, I will go in the kitchen and make us some breakfast.