9:03 a.m. - 2005-05-15
kailua
Sitting in a lawn chair in the almost-dark. The sun is setting; only it's setting two mountain ranges away, on the opposite side of the island, and nothing in the sky corresponds to my definition of "sunset". Nothing here refers to sunsets I know from photos in calendars provided to me by wholesale parts suppliers and insurance agents and chinese restaurants; nothing in this elegant shift of hues corresponds to the cartoon rendering on your beach towel. And even if we could capture, with an airbrush, the profound subtlety of this display on a t-shirt or the tail-gate of a pickup, the message it would convey regarding Tino's love for Alicia, or Myrna's chances of staying with Junior 4-eva, would be unclear. So it's like I'm seeing a sunset for the first time.
The tradewinds are rolling fat clouds overhead w/much interplay between vapor forms and dying light. Is it our natural instinct as language-bearing animals to assign cloud-shapes a visual analogue? When it's windy like this the imagination gets a workout, stretching each analogy towards an oft-surreal conclusion; race cars turning into lions, naked chinese girls turning into melon-headed larvae men w/baby dinosaur arms... This sublime and esoteric color-palette, this grotesque and evocative visual riffing of the clouds: this is not a standard sunset, this is a John Coletrane arrangement of a sunset standard. This is jazz for my eye.
