Status Updates From The Horn Island Logs of Wal...

After visiting the Walter Anderson Museum in Ocean Springs a few weeks ago and being moved by some of his quotes, I decided to read his book detailing his adventures on and around Horn Island. His writing is s simple and rich as his drawings. I am enjoying it immensely.

"Change--it is magical; where once were magnolia and uprooted oaks and cast-up debris from river floods--now stand groves of stately pines, growing in a white sand beach just two or three feet above high tide level."

"...it was a dramatic effect of strong contrast, the glare of the white sand at one end and the dark shadows on the water, with the white star set in a black widow's peak on the forehead of each tern. There was light in everything. No lost places disappearing without definition--everything needed to be considered in relating the parts to the strange and transient unity."

"I stalked a herd of pigs--cunning little black sounders--and had them turn into water lily leaves. Then a stalk of dead bull rushes--turned into a Least Bittern, bill pointed skyward, eyes looking straight at you--horizontally one on each side of the upward pointing bill."

"I drew it in ecstasy. It was a concentrated image that nothing could take from me. If it was not poetry it was the image asked for by Yeats from which poetry is made. I am a painter so this morning I did two water colors of it before I got out of bed. This does not mean that I am going to be content with that one image for the rest of my life. It will generate power in me for a while, then I need another."

...[a young heron] reached a branch and stood-and stretched and stretched, silhouetted against an enormous white cloud. It seemed that with very little it would climb the cloud and take the kingdom of heaven by force-God knows it needs taking.

I drew it in ecstasy.

"I saw...a pattern of terns, almost a tone, changing from white to dark in flight so that the spiral form is brought out by the values of the bodies against the sky. A mosaic of sky--of birds, of feathers: the celestial inverted cone of heaven, always there but needing to be realized."

"I have just captured a reptile over five feet long. I call it a palmetto snake for purely aesthetic reasons. It is seen best twined in and out among the stems of the leaves. The pattern of the scales in brown and yellow and lilac repeats the palm motif in the stem."

"I warmed myself with hot coffee then did a water color of three French ducks rising--trying to make it dramatic. It was dramatic but I wanted to know why."

(Man apparently lives the life of some sort of draught animal as soon as he begins to work. Put his back into it, he feels the traces tighten--the world begins to breathe again--the chariot of the sun is once again in motion, only it isn't a chariot at all, it's the terrible truck of doom and it is drawn by its servants and rolls over the defenseless bodies of its victims. ...

"Then the man o' war birds all floated facing this cloud three or four deep in strata with the concave fronts of their wings to the full convex forms of the clouds. They were innumerable, as the forms in a pattern repeat where if a small part is shown the effect is beyond counting."

"The whole island seems a concentration of life. It is swarming hidden among the mangroves, it is left on the beach among the decayed wood pulp, and it apparently comes in a perpetual spiral motive [motif] from the sun itself."

(Coming back there were cows on the dunes which were pink--the sky was blue and they were both exactly the same value.)