Sunset, Wednesday, 18 November 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

This note is for anyone who might have been interested in my post the other day about Ayn Rand and Objectivism. Laurence Shatkin has posted a terrific essay at DailyKos on strained right-wing efforts to claim Rand as ideological godparent, excuse the expression. Shatkin simultaneously shows that the current crop of ‘conservative’ politicians and pundits hold positions completely at odds with Rand’s, and that, in any event, her ideas have been proven inadequate to the task of governing the country. His analysis of Sarah Palin as the apotheosis of what Rand called ‘the second-rater’ is priceless.

Clear Cut

The sun was here earlier. As I happened to glance out a northeast-facing window late this morning, the sun fell out of broken clouds – maybe that’s how they broke – down the field in front of me, through some trees at the bottom of the hill and up the side of the facing hill, a clear-cut spread of 20 acres of former woods. The light against the shattered clearing was beautiful for a moment, but, of course, since there were no trees, there was runoff – the sun ran off.

Sunset, Tuesday, 17 November 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Strip, Virginia

I drove to and from Richmond today, which means I got to travel, and once again survey, the entire length of what I consider one of our most mysterious landscapes, and easily our most underappreciated. Yes, I’m talking about the median strip of Interstate 64.

It stretches virtually uninterrupted from just east of Charlottesville to just west of the capital. A consistent breadth through its entire (55-mile-or-so) length – perhaps 100 feet – it’s large enough to warrant recognition and small enough (or humble enough) to have escaped notice. I’ve decided to name it.

Strip, Virginia.

Heavily wooded, tangled with vines, marked by small hills and ridges and its very own swamps and ravines, Strip, Va., is a territory worth backpacking through, and in fact I’ve considered doing just that. I imagine the Virginia state police would probably not be too thrilled with the idea.

No matter how I may feel about the practice of wrecking forest to make roads, I must admit that 64, by sharply dissecting so many miles of woods, creates a margin where we see them as in a diorama. I expect the focus of passersby is usually on the ‘official’ lands to the north and south of the interstate. I began to notice Strip, Va., while traveling to and from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, with (among many other things) its fine collection of Fabergé pieces. I began to see in the strip – in Strip – a contained and jeweled miniature of landscape. 

If any piece of land ever stood out as a singular place, you’d think it would be this cleanly demarcated DMZ (demotorized zone). Vehicular travel no doubt accounts for the slight — a focus on getting somewhere suggests that Strip is next to nothing.

I’m not being at all facetious in my praise of this wild median. Bathed in exhaust fumes and headlight beams, held in place by a pair of two-lane federal highways rushing in exactly opposite directions, Strip strikes me as a truly American natural monument.

Sunset, Monday, 16 November 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Now we have our second straight day of Indian Summer, with trees half bare and the strange combination of warmth and horizontal sunlight crashing through the woods. In entire fields of blown-out goldenrod, the sun makes blinding coronas behind tall flourishes of white filament. I know there’s no photosynthesis going on, the goldenrod’s dry stalks and curled leaves are dust gray, but I also don’t believe anything is wasted in nature, including this light. I suspect photosynthesis of a different order, in which any light we admit into ourselves, like any degree of light or love we may be able to give, is gathered and grows even beyond our natural lives.

Sunset, Sunday, 15 November 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Having been for a long time – too long a time, about eight years, from age 16 to 24 – a devotee of Ayn Rand and Objectivism, I don’t think I can stand to read the two recent Rand biographies, even though they’re the first to be done by people outside her camp. About the most I could manage was to read the lengthy review by Thomas Mallon in The New Yorker. Mallon makes a number of excellent observations, including various ways Rand manifested behavior that was exactly the opposite of the qualities she espoused – for example, prizing meek compliance by others with her every view while publicly claiming to worship the character trait of independent thinking.

There’s only one contribution I’ve ever wanted to make to the discussion of the life and work of Ayn Rand, and Mallon comes very close to taking care of it in his review, when he writes:

Rand may be, in an aesthetic sense, the most totalitarian novelist ever to have sat down at a desk.

Along those lines, what I’ve wanted to say – hey, I’ve been saving this up since 1972, ever since I began to notice that the thought progressions in The Ayn Rand Letter were, beneath their confidently hard-waxed surface, positively deranged – is that Rand ultimately relied on the use of literally compelling rhetoric rather than on the actual content of ideas. In other words, her chief weapon – and it was exactly that – was a device she condemned, and which she called “the argument from intimidation.” You can find it defined in a really scary website assembled by her disciples, the Ayn Rand Lexicon. 

Rand made her living rendering rhetoric that would be so forceful, so powerfully, even sometimes beautifully symmetrical, so ruthlessly logical in its sound and its appearance, once you allowed yourself to step inside its force field, you could be overwhelmed. There would appear to be no escape. But it only looked logical. It sounded rational. It was in fact a fantastic structure based on a profound desire to make the world conform to what she wished it to be in her mind, which became the will to intimidate.

O.K., I feel better now.

Update on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11:07AM by BVD

For anyone interested in the American right wing’s attempts to claim Ayn Rand as part of its ideological heritage, I strongly recommend a recent post on DailyKos, “The Ayn Rand Myth” by Laurence Shatkin.