In Which We Dreamed of the Way I Was For You and You Were For Me

Edward Hopper's 'Early Sunday Morning'What Could As Easily Not Exist

by WILL HUBBARD

I've been listening to Astral Weeks once every night. I like thinking about how the instrumentation was recorded after the vocals were laid down. I've gotten back into this album so many times that it no longer takes me back to the first time I heard it. For the record, though, that was on a dorm-room floor in the days when ecstasy had hold of us and I secretly believed I'd be a great painter one day.

In a gated-off patch of grass and brush along the waterfront near my house, a man has been living for some time off of the land. There is a hole in the gate that fastens shut with a padlock, a trail leading back to his tarpaulin, cardboard, and scrapmetal dwelling. Apparently he has a tape-player of some sort, because every time I pass along the gate "Madame George" is pressing out faintly through the ironweed. He might have gotten the single at a gas station music kiosk.

Last night, I had two thoughts about Astral Weeks, one leading from the other, that bore the mark of indelibilty. Still this morning, a Sunday, both thoughts would repeat, easily delineable. Now, hours later, the task of constructing an IKEA bedside table dividing me from them, I can get to but where the ideas were. A path, a channel. A locus of memory now deteriorated. I have the form of them but they are irrecoverable. I stand at the grave but it is empty.

I do however remember that a big print of Edward Hopper's Early Sunday Morning hung in parent's room when I was a child. We moved a bunch of times, but in every new house the faintly menacing, entirely tranquil scene would appear over my father's bureau. I suppose one day I will have a bureau, and important things to put into (and above) a bureau. I fear that I already have a bureau, and that I am typing into it right now.

There is a another man living down the street who is always on his stoop when I pass. Once a month he gets out his tools and constructs, with great precision, another steel bookshelf or storage rack. The sale of them apparently pays the rent. He has two children and a wife, all of whom are constantly around him, never at work or in school. They are the most cheerful and open children I have ever seen. She is a solemn but evidently content wife.

The more you think about it, the creepier it becomes ever time Van Morrison says chiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiild on Astral Weeks. Sure, the nymphet theme can be beautiful in literature and music, but does he have to keep saying chiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiild like that, all raspy and suggestive? At the same time, I guess I'd probably talk like that if I smoked. (Instead I'm breaking apart the last remains of a nicotine lozenge with the tip of my tongue and a molar.)

I was once told that those happy people down the street were Spanish—they speak Spanish to one another, good English to everyone else. The front door to their basement apartment is always wide open, children or dogs calmly coming and going, carelessly. Tonight they were grilling sausages out on the sidewalk, smiling at me as if in invitation to join their twilight celebration. I smiled back, as I always do, as if to say ‘thank you, but it is not in me.’ Their essence is constancy, the embodiment of the adverb always. 'To be born again, in another world, darling' is another thing I could have said to them but did not.

Come to think of it, I don't have much to say about Early Sunday Morning either; not that it's a boring painting, it's just that it doesn't bother drawing attention to any particular aspect of itself. Something electrifies the paint the moment before you look, and when you see the painting it bears what Frank O'Hara once termed "post exertion visibility." Funny how you can have no idea what a line of poetry means until you apply it to an otherwise indescribable phenomenon.

The love that loves the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves to love the love that loves to love the love that loves. Almost like a Kanye West lyric, except with more grammar.

Edward Hopper's father was a dry goods merchant. (What is a dry good?) Despite early potential, he did not sell his first painting until he was 31 years old. It is reported that the decade leading up to this sale Hopper spent long periods sitting despondently in front of his easel, unable to think of anything to paint, let alone paint. Van Morrison had no such trouble, already touring Europe with his band The Monarchs at the age of seventeen. His father raised masts at a shipyard.

Have you ever noticed that when something rises vertically above eye-level it seems to overhang? For example, standing on the ground between two large buildings, they enclose one's upward view as they rise, seeming to hang over the street in an incomplete pyramid. Toward the locus of our vision all things tend. It is the same with the mind—the superior idea immediately, as though by some magnetism, tends toward what already exists in our frame of reference. The phenomenon is more dangerous in the case of the mind, for while the building will surely not fall, new ideas have a tendency to implode in the presence of our pretensions to knowledge.

There is a black square in the top right corner of Hopper's painting that breaks its general symmetry. I experienced considerable stress as a child wanting to erase that black box. Why was it there? Was it a mistake? An error? Now I chalk it up to the shadow of a tall building meant to signal the imminent inexistence of the small town 'early sunday morning' peace. Yet it is not this also, this anti-focal point. Like the pause in Van Morrison's phrasing between "fourteen...... year old," the black box is something we can, depending on our present condition, ignore, worry about, or savor.

Early this morning, a Monday, I was running down a dark street lined with crumbling relics if the East River's industrial era. A man sleeping in a corner pulled back the heavy felt covers from his face just as I passed and yelled, all raspy and suggestive, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?" He was right. I had no answer.

Will Hubbard is the executive editor of this publication. His tumblr of the week is here.

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