Sunflower fields are a gift of fall – particularly for those of us who like to photograph. The colors, the strong forms, the way they attract wildlife all make me visit them again and again. They also seem to elicit a lot of associations from poets, composers, film makers and so on. (My generation will remember Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in Sunflower if only for Mancini’s saccharine musical score that was whistled across all of Europe in 1970.) I’ll spare you.

For a poem I chose William Blake’s Ah Sunflower, because it reflects autumnal transience in better ways than I could possibly offer.It also gives me always a kick to read about something that looks like 8 simple lines and then learning what they could possibly stand for. Or, more precisely, how scholars fight over potential meanings. Is the Ah a sigh? Of delight? Of surprise? Of pity?

Your guess is as good as mine, or, come to think of it, probably better than mine. I say this because I was also completely clueless when it comes to the symbolism of the sunflower (again, offered by scholars): a “fallen” human, or persistent love, or frustrated love, or lost innocence, or corrupted love, or poetic imagination, or spiritual yearning, or all of these?”  Oh, (sigh of irritation) the things I don’t know. Here is Wikipedia to the rescue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ah!_Sun-flower

Attached below are Benjamin Britten’s take on the poem

and a Ginsberg reading of it.

I’ll stick to photographing them…..

There is a decided smell of fall in the air when walking early in the morning, hints of russet and smidgens of gold in the scorched landscape, and migratory birds starting to appear. I feel, so far, none of the melancholia associated with fall, just plain relief that the heat is over and the rains have come.

During antiquity the Greeks coined melancholia from the words melas and cholé, blackness of the bile. They thought an overabundance of this black bile poisoned you and it was associated with the fall months, the astrological signs of libra, scorpio and sagittarius. If you look up the definition it speaks of deep sadness or gloom. During the middle ages melancholia was touted as one of the deadly sins, to be defied with prayer and willpower. During the romantic age with the emerging celebration (if not cult) of “geniuses,” people took recourse to Aristoteles’ writings, who claimed melancholia was the precursor of mania which enabled all kinds of glorious deeds by philosophers, artists, poets and politicians…

The combination of depression and mania is of course known to us as bipolar disease and indeed, many famous people are said to have lived with it, including Florence Nightingale, Virginia Woolf, Marilyn Monroe,Ernest Hemingway, Winston Churchill, Vincent van Gogh, Buzz Aldrin, Edgar All Poe, Jimmy Hendrix, Graham Greene, Alvin Ailey, John Ruskin, Edvard Munch and Gustav Mahler to name just a few in no particular order. If you Google it, the list is overwhelming – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_bipolar_disorder

but the real statistics includes of course many more non-famous than famous people: the World Health Organization considers it the 6th leading cause of disability worldwide, affecting up to 30 million people.

Well, no gloom on this end and no glorious deeds either, even if it is the time of year that has me listen to “fall” music, which often has a melancholy tinge, focussing on the transient nature of things. The only thing I want to think about in terms of transience is that of our current political landscape after the outcome of the November election…but that doesn’t keep me from pulling up my fall play list!

Let’s start with the oboe, with its perfect melancholy sound  – there is a full album with works by French composers dedicated to that instrument, played by one of Germany’s major oboists  – principal oboist at the Berlin Philharmonic – Albrecht Mayer. It is called Bonjour Paris. (And you are better off listening to the clip from it attached below with your eyes closed, because of the inane posing in front of major landmarks.)

Here is Fauré’s Pavane, Op.50  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlsTEgb4FSw

And here is a crisper version with no visuals arranged for oboe and piano this time.

Photographs from my walk last Friday. The pelicans were a true surprise, they are not typically seen in these parts.

And the buzzards were waiting to hear the end of the Manafort story….