Making use of winter

Does anyone forget his own puerile lamentations, so widely subscribed not long ago, on the suspension of Summer for a few alternative seasons? They don't wear well, and it's seemly for them to have been muffled by visual awe at the present interval, for which refreshment we naturally turn to Valéry Lorenzo or the places he goes. As we've seen repeatedly, he is a nimble but not a facile guide to gorgeousness of one kind or another, as a recent hike down his blogroll brought home to me this past weekend. Please welcome Lionel André to our "Context" and enrich your domestic discourse by sharing the discovery of his poetry and pictures.

Or, rather, as I may be the last to discover, André has given himself the distinction of a career as mountaineer's "accompanist" and traveler in southern France and northern Italy, while giving his publisher and galleries imagery and commentary of acute witness to paradox and to beauty. "La rapide," he writes of a stream he photographs extensively, "est une langue." He treats this roadway with that perception in reverse, as a receptor of utterances changing constantly.

There are worse seasonal afflictions than a tendency to remain indoors, and to devote oneself to the contemplative absorption of a companionable sensibility. For rather a long time, I've imagined this impulse to have been Franz Schubert's in much of the music of his that we love, quite apart from Die Winterreise. I recall the San Francisco Ballet's magnificent performances of Ashton's choreography for the Wanderer Fantasy, which as much as anything else hints at the dance's supremacy in the projection of music. Plainly, winter, in that very way of giving form to temperatures, is interpreted as well as observed as more than weight and stillness in his pictures.