Autumn sensation

THE colours of autumn are quieter than those of spring or summer, but have an urgency to them. By midautumn I look harder and harder at them, because tomorrow or the next day they may have changed, or been ended by rain and wind.

Littlebourne

My favourite sighting this autumn was the sequence of colours from Littlebourne Rd round to Queens Dr. As the trees themselves alternate between deciduous and evergreen, their colours run from gold or yellow, to ginger or russet, seen against the contrasting thick green of the manukas. The leaves fall on to the footpath and into the gutter, making a splendid russet deposit, a regular curving stripe, defined by the bush on one side, the gutter on the other. This whole ensemble is laid out to the eye on an upslope bend.

Why bother?

But what’s the point of such ‘‘wordpainting’’? Wouldn’t an actual painting record and celebrate their beauty better? Words are better for understanding leafcolours, the parts and the whole effect. By naming things we seize on them and make sense of them (apprehending, to comprehend). Languages go deeper into the underlying process, the change. In that spirit, let’s relish the next stage of the change, without budging from Littlebourne, from that shaded upslope.

Next

When the leaves reach the ground, they merge into the gingery russet: their footpath stripe is now a rich uniform brown. They’re becoming a

paste, slosh, smush; a sludge or

slurry; a glue, goo, gloop, or glop. They’re merging into mud. And these names are not naming the same thing, nor in the same way, and certainly not in the perception.

Spendthrift English

English has many names for the stages of decomposition. Besides scientific sludge and

slurry, it abounds in differences of expression. And these differ by nature, as well as in the fact that the words have diverse sound, rhythm and so on. A glue relates to glutinous, and Latin

glutinare: sticky, it sticks things together. Goo, gloop, and glop are slang or babytalk. But all the /g/ words share a clinging sensation in the mouth when said with full expression; the

/gl/ doubly so, by joining the two ends of the palate, guttural to liquid consonant. And not unappreciatively, either. Paste too: it relates to pasta, pesto,

pestle, and all sorts of gluey aspects shared with cooking. I find that I’m smacking my lips over the strong colour and sticky richness of the detritus of Littlebourne.

Drip and drop

There’s poetry there too. Thomas Hardy’s Weathers ends with a stanza on autumn, in which ‘‘Drops on gatebars hang in a row’’; a drop is a fat droplet, not a drip, because he needs

drip to say that ‘‘Beeches drip in brown and duns’’. It’s the leaves that drip, not just the raindrops: they fall like soggy coloured flakes, to join the gloppy carpet. (Seniors, watch your footing.)

Back to colours

As for the browns and duns

Hardy has found another apt colourword: dun. Browns become duns in the fading off. It’s the great decomposition of autumn into winter’s mud, and regeneration beyond. As another poet put it, ‘‘When winter comes can spring be far behind?’’

Apprehending and comprehending

So precise scientific terms do have their place. But if we kept to them, we should surrender the chance of finding our own words for the riches of senseexperience; and for making the mind come alive.