April 25

Trains are fey wild things. They have always been thus for me: running that Eastern corridor between Montreal and Toronto for Thanksgiving in my twenties would also move me to heady alteration. I’d do my best writing on trains. I was startled a few years ago to read Bob Dylan saying that he needed that feeling of going somewhere that a train provides in order to write.

Perhaps it’s a Canadian obsession, echoes of a colonialist past where land was woman, all mystery and wild beauty, with the discoverer darkly anxious to conquer and own…but I carry with me that fascination with landscape, and how the nation is bound up in it like so many symbioses that one organism is no longer distinguishable from the other. As the train carried me from Amsterdam to Brussels, Van Gogh haunted me; Van Gogh and his landscapes. I wrote the following:

Having seen Van Gogh three times now, I watch this countryside through his eyes--the particular curve of a tree, lateral curves of a branch, the buds, blossoms. The fields--flat, wet, lonely. Air heavy with the humidity, dispersing the light. As I've said, it grounds me; must write Dana as she would appreciate that. Remember rare mists when I was young--felt somehow very safe. Anyhow. Tree stumps gracious in a kind of need, shoot pushing froth where thick limbs once were; like so many antennae reaching for.....what are they reaching for?? Somehow tree stumps are made beautiful here--if a distressing beauty.