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November152009

Sempé Fi: The Fall

Filed under: Sempé Fi   Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

Drooker_AutumninCentralPark_11-09-09.JPG

Pollux writes:

Fall is here, and perhaps it is inevitable that we should get a New Yorker cover that features the image of leaves turning colors and falling on the grounds of Central Park. “Delicious autumn,” the novelist George Eliot once wrote. “My very soul is wedded to it. And if I were a bird I would fly about the Earth seeking the successive autumns.”

But for the November 9, 2009 cover, called “Autumn in Central Park,” we do not get a peaceful, calm scene of yellow, gold, orange, red, and red-orange leaves. The cover artist, Eric Drooker, gives us a fiery blaze of paint blots that is more dynamic than calming.

The cover is eye-catching, making the New Yorker magazine stand out on a long rack of competing titles.

The color reminds me of a Californian wildfire, the two figures in its center burn victims rather than peaceful pedestrians in Central Park. They’re not in love; they’re not even touching. They walk right into the epicenter of the autumnal conflagration. They are painted in a black smoky color; their long, afternoon shadows look like plumes of smoke.

Drooker creates an image not of touristic leaf peeping but of leaves dominating, encircling, and enveloping an almost antediluvian man and woman, and a fence and lamppost that seem almost flimsy in the face of a fiery fall.

The autumn of course signals change, and change is often violent, and often explosive. Instead of leaves falling gently on the ground, Drooker gives trees exploding with painful transformation. In life, we see change caused by confrontation rather than contemplation.

In any case, leaves do not fall so much as they are ejected by the trees that bear them. As reported by NPR not too long ago, trees, triggered by chemical signals, discard the leaves when they become nonfunctional. It’s a “shoving” of the leaves by the tree, not a gentle falling.

And so our souls may be wedded to delicious autumn, but without even knowing it, our souls are wedded to intense change as well.

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