Three uncarved pumpkins the size of candlepin bowling balls stud the mulch in the front garden of a neighbor’s house on the short street where I live. City creatures—squirrels, raccoons, rats—have chewed coin-size circles through the tough outer rind and into the stringy pale flesh below. These sections of gnaw are now ringed with black. The black of rot, a black that looks at once dusty, as though charred by the flame of time, and slick, like the vegetal squelch of something long forgotten in a drawer of the fridge. It is a definitive black, the black of something making slow return to a different state.
Along the river, the milkweed pods have split and pour forth their seeded snow-white silk. I walk south along the river when the sun is in the final stages of its work, and scramble down the banks to look. Off tall stalks, desiccated pods spill a thrilling and climactic white. White like rabbit fur, like pearl, white that holds rainbows when the light hits right.
Fluttered with nonchalance
The leaves of the young gingko trees that grow out of the sidewalk fell all at once. A few days ago, the fan-shaped leaves with their crenulated margins glowed gold from the branches and fluttered with nonchalance. The following morning, I gasped to see it: branches all but bare and the trees seemed to grow out of puddles of gold.
At the cemetery nearby, a twisting Japanese maple is aflame, its feathery leaves a deep red, a bodily red, a red that blazes between wine and blood. Those leaves will grip the branches much deeper into the month than most of the trees around it, almost tauntingly, in a flare of lingering crimson.
These are the colors of November in the neighborhood.
The German artist Anselm Kiefer knew something of the November palette. In 1984, he painted a massive, barren field. Nubs of crops rise from ashy earth and retreat in boney rows into a pale horizon. The painting stretches more than eighteen feet across and nearly eleven feet high, and as you approach it, you can almost hear the crunch of dried stalk stubs beneath your feet and smell the smoke and coming snow. In the upper left corner of the canvas, against a small swell of gold, Kiefer wrote the word “Nigredo.”
In Jungian terms
In alchemy, nigredo is the first of four stages in the process of transformation, defined by the blackness of putrefaction and char. The following three stages—albedo, citrinitas, and rubedo—are likewise associated with color: white and gold and red. In analytic psychology, nigredo is the stage where one descends into the chaos and darkness of the unconscious and encounters; in Jungian terms, the shadow. Kiefer’s field is forbidding, grim, but it is no wasteland. With that one word he makes us know that the November crunch of dead earth below the feet holds the promise of rebirth, of coming out the other side of the dark.
A black cloud approaches from the east over a craggy river-valley landscape in Bruegel the Elder’s 1565 depiction of November in Return of the Herd, one of a series of paintings he did depicting the months. The palette is all ochres, golds, and grays. Bruegel was a painter of ruddy-faced merriment and mischief, of soup bowls and warm loaves and codpieces in taverns and towns, as well as Boschian hellscapes. Here he depicts six men driving cattle down a path, away from the pasture and back to the barn, the dark cloud at their backs, winter on its way.
But there’s no fear here. The dark is coming, chaos will descend, and man and animal move together without haste in the face of it, knowing what approaches and knowing what needs to be done. In Bruegel’s November, all feels orderly and a steady rumble of thudding hooves quilts the afternoon. The group heads toward protection and warmth, a roof, a hearth. Don’t be afraid: it’s there to be found.
This is not a confrontation with the sublime, no approach to the abyss, the ceaseless and non-understandable, and the swooping sense of awe and doom it brings. Bruegel shows instead the natural and human world in sync and a darkness that is, for now, kept at bay.
Pruned paths
We know, though, that the darkness comes, and the vast unpeopled places terrify. An experiment in 2005 asked forty-eight university students to look at images of wild nature—let’s say pounding seas and jagged cliffs and wide canyons—as well as images of “managed nature”—let’s say a park with pruned paths and manicured bushes, with flowerbeds of tulips and pansies. The students were then asked to rate how beautiful they found these scenes. Prior to looking at the images, the researchers reminded the members of one group that someday they would die. What they found: Those who had death whispered in their ear showed less preference for the scenes of wild nature.
- Paris Review
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