The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over the federal capital city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
- This columnist's respectful Canberra adaptation of Carl Sandburg's famous poem about his similarly fog-blessed Chicago.
...............................................
Because we are living in accursed times (it is helpful to think of awful people like Trump and Putin and even our very own Pauline Hanson as curses inflicted on mankind) we must all, for our mental health's sake, count our many blessings.
Every Canberra winter I choose to say a heartfelt "thank you" for the blessing of Canberra's superabundant fogs.
This federal capital city, with an average of 47 fogs a year, most of them between May and August, is by far the most fog-blessed of Australian cities.
When and if Canberra ever creates a role of a city poet/Canberra poet laureate (every self-respecting city in the United States and the United Kingdom has one so why not cultured Canberra, too?) he or she or they will be bound to write about Canberra's unique and superabundant and transforming fogs. Fog-enviable Chicago has an average of 120 fogs a year and so it is no wonder that Chicagoan Carl Sandburg, so committed to writing about his characterful city, makes many poem-mentions of Chicago's fogs.
To give you an inkling of why your poetically sensitive columnist loves Canberra's fogs, I offer this little vignette.
One morning last week I awoke to find my distressingly average Canberra suburb (and for all I know the whole of Canberra) visited by a beguilingly suburb-transforming fog. It had arrived so silently, just as fogs do, its patient gracefulness meeting Sandburg's perfect personification of fog as a quiet, purposefully coming-and-going cat.
My especially boring neighbourhood of my especially boring suburb has seen a great deal of "gentrification" through which wealthy people, Trumpianly displaying more wealth than taste, have been enabled to knock down small, modest homes and to erect gigantic, vulgar, immodest ones in their places. But on this morning, fog blurring and disguising harsh things, even the ugliest of these hulking brutes was being leant some mystery and mystique.
What I'm getting at is deftly captured in Cheryl Wilfong's prose-poem, Emily Dickinson's Last Words.
"Today is foggy all morning. The trees, the gardens are indistinct. All delineation is softened. Where does one thing end and another begin? Where do you end? Where do you begin?"
Yes, my suburb's fog, by making everything about my suburb indistinct, by softening the delineations of every object, including and especially the Trumpian mansions of the nouveau riche, gave my suburb some lovely elements of make-believe.
And, dear readers, warming to my theme, I ask you this hypothetical-rhetorical question. If the great impressionist painter Claude Monet (1840-1926) migrated to Australia, bringing his paints and easel, in which Australian city would he insist on living?
Give up? Why, Canberra of course!
We know this because Monet loved fogs, what they did to cityscapes, and the artistic challenges and opportunities those fog-transformings gave an artist.
"The thing I like best about London is the fog," Monet wrote in 1900, when he was working outdoors on oil sketches of London's Houses of Parliament. Each of his many paintings of London's Waterloo Bridge is a variation of how the bridge's appearance is softened and made indistinct by fog. Monet needed these fogs and their beautiful interventions. Of one morning of his Houses of Parliament painting days in 1900, he wrote: "When I got up I was terrified to see that there was no fog, not even a wisp of mist. I was prostrate."
He goes on to record that, thank God, this awful foglessness was just an aberration and blessed true fogginess was soon restored to his London. But yes, think how "terrified" Monet would be getting up too late on a Canberra winter morning (for the cat of a Canberra fog has usually got up and silently padded away by 10.30am) and finding the city starkly lit by harsh bright sunlight which reveals all the city's hard delineations and stark distinctions.
We know that it was just like that where Emily Dickinson lived (a recluse, she lived all her 1830-1886 life in Amherst, Massachusetts) because she describes it in her tiny poem The Sun and Fog contested.
The Sun and Fog contested
The Government of Day -
The Sun took down his Yellow Whip
And drove the Fog away -
I will rest my case (that Canberra's fogs lend Canberra a special enchantment) by pointing to how the most famous of all paintings of Canberra are of a fog-softened and enchanted city.
The Readers: "Ian, you must be referring to Marion Mahony Griffin's quietly glorious depictions of an imagined Canberra that accompanied and enhanced her husband's entry in the international competition for the design of a federal capital city."
The columnist: "Spot on, discerning readers! What a joy it is to write for so cultured and educated an audience as you!"
Yes, when you look at Marion's famously magical rendering of the city vista from atop Mount Ainslie, it is a city and bush setting lightly veiled in a becoming and fairytaleish mistiness, by which all delineations are softened and all imaginings of a fabled future city are made possible.
