Light Traces

10. Summer Snow

10 Summer Snow 87 Even though it is midsummer, almost a month after the solstice, yesterday brought a fairly heavy snowfall in the mountains. As we drove up through the pass, the temperature plummeted, and the heavy rain and thick fog deprived all but the immediate surroundings of its visibility. There could be little doubt but that higher up, around the soaring peaks, snow was falling. Yet, as night came on to enshroud everything, enclosing even the fog and clouds in darkness, not even the slightest glimpse of the raging elements above was possible. We would have to wait until morning. Morning brought the tranquility that follows the storm. Now nature’s assault has given way to the assurance offered by the few cumulus clouds that drift across the otherwise clear sky. On the mountain peaks the snow glistens in the intense light of the summer sun. Its pure whiteness, quite different from the dull gray of glacial ice, Seefeld Tirol July 88 LIGHT TR ACES bespeaks that it is light and fleeting. Clearly it will last only for a short time. By evening it will almost be gone. By tomorrow hardly a trace will remain. Both in color and in its visible texture the glistening snow contrasts with the bare rock that protrudes here and there, especially where the mountainside is at its steepest. There are also places where the snow reaches down past the tree line. Within these areas extending down toward the forest, the exchange between ice and stone that prevails on the peaks gives way to an inverted and distorted semblance of growth, as if the dark evergreens grew up out of the purely white ground, as if growth were from light to dark rather than from the dark earth into the light. Especially under such rare conditions, the Alpine peaks provide, more than ever, a place where the elements are gathered, a place for this gathering. As sheer stone the earth thrusts upward, its verticality reversing what seems the natural tendency and place of this element. The snow gathered on the peaks is equally out of place at this time of year when all but the most tenacious glacial ice should have undergone its natural transformation and streamed down into the valley below to water all that humans have planted and tended there. The contour of this gathering of stone and ice, of earth and water, appears sharply against the sky, which is given texture and pattern by the voluminous clouds. The puffy white clouds appear darker than usual by contrast with the snow. And yet, when the sun breaks through the clouds, the snow on the peaks shines so intensely that it is as if it were a mirror reflecting the surrounding clouds with such brilliance that the purest white is restored–or even first granted–to them. Yet it is the mountain peaks 89 SUMMER SNOW that provide the fulcrum, the focal point, or rather the visible expanse where the elements come together. In their majestic ascendancy and radiant shining, they provide a place where earth and water, sky and the upper air are gathered, a place where they concur in an elemental proximity . Here there is made visible in their lines of articulation the four presences that the Greeks took to be the roots or elements of all things; or at least there is made visible something like what the Greeks named in words that remain virtually untranslatable and that most certainly are not conveyed by the usual names that we give to the elements. For this reason it is imperative that we not be captivated by our own form of speech but endeavor instead to experience anew and to say anew elemental nature as nature itself brings it into view or sets before us the script in which the elemental is encoded. In the shining of the snow atop the mountains, the light, which makes all things visible, is itself granted a distinctive–even if borrowed –visibility. That which makes visible is itself brought conspicuously before our vision rather than, as otherwise happens, merely being taken for granted as the condition of vision. In this accomplishment nature can be regarded as imitating art, at least as imitating the mode of painting that, as with the Impressionists, inverts our usual way of seeing: whereas we usually focus exclusively on the things that are visible without taking note of the spread of light that renders them visible, such painting lets us see the...