‘Dawn Light’ on Water

Review by Bill Doughty––

Diane Ackerman shares this with us:

In Ireland there are many names for rain depending on the temperature, duration, or season.  Germans use words “designed to capture the sound of rain: pladdern (heavy rain with big drops), prasseln (heavy rain but smaller drops), giessen (pouring rain), sprühen (spray-like rain), trop fern (dripping).” “Hawaiians require over a hundred names for rain, including kolele ua, a light moving rain; ‘olulo, a storm beginning out at sea; and Kahio o ke aka, rain that’s so beautiful it must be the adornment of the gods.”

Word artist Diane Ackerman writes about rain, clouds, seas, skies, and seasons –– and "the experience of being alive –– in her radiant “Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day” (W. W. Norton, 2009). Among other topics and musings, she interprets Claude Monet and impressionism, focusing on Monet’s Impression, Sunrise.

“Surely Monet has been up for hours painting this watercolor sky in full cloud regatta. He limned many weatherscapes, but like the other Impressionists, preferred the sparkling blue skies of early morning when the air is tranquil. One can tell the time of day by the small puffy clouds that stalk their paintings, sometimes with wispy clouds higher above. Even in Paris, where pollution chalked the view, they tended to paint nearly empty skies with small well-behaved cumuli that haven’t had time yet to swell in the hot humid afternoon haze.”

Impressionism was Monet’s, Renoir’s, and Pissarro’s ways of expressing life as they perceived it in the moment.

“The experience of being alive is only one impression after another, a feast for the senses in ever-changing light, one now seamlessly flowing into the next moment of being. How do you explore the texture of being alive? In Impression, Sunrise, Monet paints the lavish spell of the senses detained by a pink and blue sunrise, colors that create purple where they meet, in a softly puzzling war of blue and red that’s not so much hue as emotion, as the eye struggles to make sense of it but pleasures in the ambiguity, and where a slightly out-of-focus fisherman floats in his own reality (no doubt occasionally eyeing the painter on the dock), and the rising sun is a watery fireball at the end of a long path of copper cobblestones.”

The harbor, Ackerman notes, was painted “at dawn, on a misty morning, when sun and sky shone equally luminous and a simple squiggle of black was enough to create a fisherman in the foreground.”

One of Monet’s influences was the eccentric nature-centric Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. Monet supposedly happened to see Hokusai’s work in a food shop in Amsterdam, “where cheap paper decorated with Japanese prints was being used to wrap purchases.”

Hokusai was born in then closed-to-the-world Japan in 1760 and produced his most iconic works late in life as Japan was about to be opened to the world.

“It was in his seventies that he began the stunning series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which also included The Great Wave off Kanagawa, probably the most reproduced print on earth, a scene of turbulent foam-tipped waves of cyan and pale blue clawing at three small fishing boats in which frightened men frantically bend to their oars. In the flat golden sky, billowy clouds promise a placid morning, and a tiny Mount Fuji sits calmly in the background. It’s the foreground that holds all the drama, though I think most people miss the nearly capsized swift boats that carry fresh foodstuffs at dawn to the Tokyo markets from nearby villages. That the mood of the ocean and the sky don’t match –– galloping chariots of carnal blue under a fair-weather sky –– creates a sinister beauty that alarms the senses at the same time that it reassures the psyche. To the men, the wave is much taller than the volcanic mountain, a perspective that fits. With a faint echo of the fishermen, we’re swept up onto the waves, knowing that at any moment the waves are going to crash.”

USNWC Color Guard at M.C. Perry statue, Newport, RI. (Haley M Nace)

Note: Hokusai was a teenager living in feudal Japan when America’s founders declared independence from Imperial England. He died in 1849, three years before President Millard Fillmore assigned U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew C. Perry the mission of sailing to Japan to open the country to trade with the West. The Convention of Kanagawa (the same Kanagawa in Hokusai’s iconic work) was signed in 1854. Monet was a teenager in 1854; he painted Impression, Sunrise in 1872.

Commodore M.C. Perry (namesake of the high school at Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, my alma mater, by the way), is honored by Japanese and American friendship groups each year both in the United States, particularly in Newport, Rhode Island, Perry’s hometown, and in Shimoda, Japan, at the Black Ship (Kurofune) Festival. Marines and Sailors often participate in the annual festival with parades, concerts, school visits, and other community outreach events.

U.S. Marines from Camp Fuji and Sailors from USS Stethem (DDG-63) march in a parade at the Black Ship Festival in Shimoda, May 18, 2019 (MC2 T. Fraser)

In “Dawn Light” Diane Ackerman connects seasons and cultures, people and animals, prose and poetry, sound and silence, nature and nurture, and cold perception with warm imagination.

Ultimately this is a book about literal and figurative enlightenment in Ackerman’s world, hoping for a better appreciation and respect for life, nature, and our precious time alive in the cosmos. A time for Love.

Ackerman shares her views as well as those of poets who appear throughout the book. She also includes more than a dozen beautiful full-color photos and prints.

Returning to the recurring images of water and the sea, as well as West (Monet) meets East (Hokusai), here are Ackerman’s choices for epigraphs to this book:

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise

somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once;

a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising.

Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and

gloaming, on sea and continents and islands,

each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

–– JOHN MUIR

This world of ours ––

To what shall I compare it?

To the white waves of a boat

That disappear without a trace

As it rows away at dawn.

–– SHAMI MANSEI, EIGHTH CENTURY

This is a book for anyone who'd care to wake up to the experience of being alive.

Spectators observe Shimoda City's firework show during the 83rd annual Shimoda Black Ship festival, May 21, 2022. The Shimoda Black Ship Festival celebrates Commodore Matthew C. Perry's arrival to Japan, Japan's subsequent opening to international trade, and the U.S.-Japan alliance. (MC1 Kaleb J. Sarten)

(A nice accompaniment to this post: Neil Young & Crazy Horse's new album, "World Record.")