“You can observe a lot by just watching,” Yogi Berra famously decreed.
And autumn is the best time to use your eyes. The atmosphere is a lens, which we look at with the two lenses in our eyes. In late September, the lens of the sky takes on a pure transparency.
Every leaf on every tree is as precise as a corporate logo. You can count each bract scale on a pine cone twelve feet away.
The proud, bulging cumulus clouds of July have departed. Looking up right now, the sky is cloudless except for two wispy shapes in the west that resemble a three-year-old’s scribble.
I hate the term “mindfulness.” It sounds so joyless. In fact, my friend Peter Lamborn Wilson and I were planning to offer a class in “mindlessness” at the Omega Institute, but were too lazy to submit a proposal. (Our workshop would teach New Agers how to goof off and forget about “being in the moment.”) Now Peter’s moved on to the next world, where most likely he’s still lazy.
But autumn demands your attention. Your eyesight improves in the crystalline air. It’s like being inside an HDTV screen, where every detail is indestructibly vivid.
It’s also the best time for drying towels and sheets and underwear on the clothesline. The lucid air conveys the sun‘s rays swiftly. It’s a season of happy evaporation.
Clean-seeming eyeglasses
In summer, the air is full of fireflies, houseflies, mosquitoes, dragonflies, ladybugs, June bugs, bees, wasps, hornets, moths, butterflies. And the air itself is thick with hazy water vapor.
Summer is like looking through smudgy eyeglasses. Fall is like wiping your eyeglasses with that little pink cloth you get from your optometrist.
When I was a child, comic books ran advertisements for “x-ray spex” (later the name of a New-Wave band), glasses that allowed one to see through clothes! Even if you weren’t a sexually precocious eleven-year-old, the idea of super-vision (which you knew from Superman comics) was tickling. (Of course, the glasses were a scam – they created a double image through diffraction, which distantly resembled an x-ray.)
Have you ever seen the movie Citizen Kane? Gregg Toland, the gifted director of photography, used high-speed film, broadside arc lamps, and small camera apertures to allow the audience to see deeply into the world of Charles Foster Kane. In this (black-and-white) movie, the camera could look through a doorway into a house, down the hallway, into the kitchen, and out the back window – all with absolute clarity. It was the cinematic version of late October.
Try this seeing exercise:
Sit outdoors in a meadow or atop a mountain.
Look with both eyes.
Cover your left eye with your right hand.
Now look with one eye.
Now cover your right eye with your left hand.
Look with no eyes.
Remove your right hand from your left eye.
Look with one eye.
Remove your left hand from your right eye.
Look again with both eyes.
Do this four times.
Look at what your eyes see
Now is the time to put away your cell phone and visit your friends. See what they look like in the frictionless air. Observe the curve of their noses, the length of their arms. Memorize their torsos.
Only a few wildflowers survive into autumn – and they are tough customers. With its tall ungainly yellow head, a goldenrod blossom looks a bit like Big Bird from Sesame Street. The radiating petals of the purple aster are gently explosive, like an after-dinner burp. The black-eyed Susans in my front yard seem to be made of shiny metal. But my favorite is chicory, whose celestial blue flowers remind me of the resplendent cloak the Virgin Mary wears in the paintings of Pietro Perugino. All these uncultivated blooms reach your eye directly in the autumnal air.
Last night, walking home from watching the Trump-Harris debate at Tommy and Janet’s house – I don’t own a TV set – I looked up at the sky above High Street (my street). The stars were precise as integers.
They didn’t look close, but they looked naked. Last week, as I sat beside Esopus Creek flossing my teeth, I saw something plummet into the water: a blur of brown and white.
Then it emerged – a bald eagle – clutching a fish in its claws. Slowly, the raptor ascended from the creek, flapping its wet wings, arcing towards the east.
Was it displaying the fish for me to admire?
Anyway, fall is a good time to observe the dramas of birds.
Join the family! 
