White Feathers, Strange Sights

In the late afternoon, the waxing gibbous Moon, high in the bright blue sky, kept catching my eye -- or drawing my eye, rather; I kept craning my neck up to look at it. It seemed somehow smaller than usual -- I would have estimated it at 25 arcminutes if I didn't know better -- and very, very white, without the slightest hint of yellow. Something about it made me think of a small white feather, pennaceous along the edge, plumulaceous along the ragged-looking terminator. Once while I was looking at it, a bone-white egret -- a black-legged E. garzetta, as free as the moon of any hint of yellow -- flew across my field of vision, reinforcing the white-feather imagery.

Then, as I crested a hill, the Sun came into view -- low on the horizon, deep red-orange in color, and absolutely enormous, subjectively appearing to be close to three degrees in diameter. The contrast with the Moon -- appearing under normal conditions to be the same size and color as the Sun -- couldn't have been greater.

Ordinarily, a red setting Sun will redden the whole sky around it, but in this case, perhaps due to the complete lack of clouds, this huge engorged Sun somehow coexisted with a regular blue sky. This strange combination made me think of a picture I painted in New Hampshire in 1983, when I was four years old, which I still have for some reason. I think at first it survived many years more or less by chance, and after that it was just too old to consider throwing away. When I got home, I dug it out of my files and photographed it:

(I like to think Vincent van Gogh might have painted something like this when he was four years old, and called it Wheatfield with Brontosauruses. Unfortunately, Vincent was already in his twenties when sauropods began to emerge in popular consciousness.)

I photographed the painting with my phone and uploaded it so that I could download it from my laptop for this post. When I went to get it from the cloud, I ran across this meme I had saved on January 9, which also features a dinosaur silhouetted against the setting Sun:

Come to think of it, my dinosaur painting also bears a certain resemblance to this image I posted two months ago, in "Yellow Light and the Mushroom Planet":

The dinosaurs are walking to the right, as in my painting. This despite the fact that people -- myself very much included! -- almost always find it much easier and more natural to draw animals facing left rather than right.

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Since I haven't posted anything for a while, I'll go ahead and tack a random dream onto this. It's from a few nights ago, but I wasn't online at the time.

In the dream, it was common knowledge that in a normal forest, the canopy is more or less one continuous beehive. There are leaves and things on the lower levels, but once you get up high enough, the branches are all coated with black honey-dripping material created by bees.

I was working in a library where we were trying to create the same effect. We wanted all the bookcases to have books and books and books and then when you get high enough just this tarry black material full of bees and honey. The trick was to find a way of attracting bees to set up shop on the tops of the bookcases, and I had discovered that the best way to do this was to get big brown waxed-paper bags of frozen shoestring potatoes -- the kind they use to make French fries at fast-food places -- and put a few bags on top of each bookcase. Bees would come to eat the potatoes and then stay and build the sticky black hives we were after. This was very successful, and it made our library look very old and respectable and forest-like.

One of the very special features of this library was that we had a whole bookcase devoted to books written by members of the Moody Blues, with one shelf for each member. We had to pad out Mike Pinder's shelf with a few volumes of Pindar, the Theban poet, and there were a few other random books thrown in, including Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence by Jacques Cousteau, but conceptually it was all Moody Blues. We were very proud of it. For some reason, we put all the books on the shelves while the bookcase was lying down on the floor, and then we had to carefully lift it up into position without any of the books falling out. We successfully did this and kept commenting on how great it was that we had managed to get it "perfectly vertical." We had also managed to get the sticky black beehive at the top perfectly flush with the ceiling without damaging either hive or ceiling. All in all, it was extremely satisfactory and was something no other library could offer its patrons.