The Venetian Stain

San Marco, Venice (2009) JBowring

Venice (1953)

long wait
from blackness
to the blue
anticipation
of dawn
morning breeze
through
dark windows
chalk white
waters
frozen moss
voices
bird and man

John Hejduk

Dawn, Lake Hawea (2009), JBowring

The Venetian stain had remained for months now. A certain moment held in the mind, encountered again, in parallel, elsewhere. Dawn's pale light, Hejduk's crossing from black to blue, the chill, the water, the waiting for light. Doppelganger landscapes, experience doubled, and looping around, so that here in the high country is Venice, the stain, the taste, an essence, a homeopathic drop. Like Henry James's Spencer Brydon, one encounters one's self again, yet somehow removed, "He had that feeling that here, at last, was something to see, to touch, to take, to know -- something all unnatural and dreadful. The dense penumbra literally screened a figure which stood still in it. It loomed gloomily in the dark, it was something, it was somebody, the prodigy of a personal presence ... He was standing before someone who converted his I into another personality." The schizophrenic sense of place, here as there, is unsettling, disturbing, yet also delicious. Beyond the limits of sensibility, it enters the domain of the sublime, the rush of feeling out of place, ungrounded, out of this world. The Venetian dawn carried in the mind, then released in small doses, a contamination, a scintilla, a susurration, of else where.

"Water equals time and provides beauty with its double." Joseph Brodsky, Watermark, 1992