And the hidden joints, the concealed beds, the matched grains, the boxes which live their carefully concealed lives in other boxes: these are habits of the High Baroque.
Unlike pioneer simplicity, which was perforce crude and incomplete, Shaker simplicity spoke eloquently about its moral ideals. Every room was as much God’s place as a church. Every object was, in its fealty to spirit, in its richness of refinement, in its strenuous demands on occupants and employers, a symbol of Divinity and Divine Law.
2
Simplicities, in short, are not all the same. When, in her masterpiece called “Melanctha,” a story of black people and the problems of love, Gertrude Stein resorts to the plainness of the pioneer style, she does so to render the rhythms of black Baltimore speech, and to convey the handmade quality of such talk as it struggles to express powerful and complex feelings through the most ordinary of words and by the social patterns implicit in its echoes, rhymes, and repetitions.
Melanctha told Rose one day how a woman whom she knew had killed herself because she was so blue. Melanctha said, sometimes, she thought this was the best thing for herself to do.
Rose Johnson did not see it the least bit that way.
“I don’t see Melanctha why you should talk like you would kill yourself just because you’re blue. I’d never kill myself Melanctha just ’cause I was blue. I’d maybe kill somebody else Melanctha ’cause I was blue, but I’d never kill myself. If I ever killed myself Melanctha it’d be by accident, and if I ever killed myself by accident Melanctha, I’d be awful sorry.”
Although Ernest Hemingway’s style gets some of its substance from Gertrude Stein (it is even more deeply indebted to Sherwood Anderson), its aim is less complex than hers. He borrows a bit of machismo from the pioneer, some of his ostentatious simplicity from the Shaker, and sharpens this by means of a selectivity which is severe and narrow. If Adolph Loos, architecture’s enemy of ornament, felt we should sweep walls free and wipe planes clean, Hemingway’s purpose was to seize upon the basics right from the beginning and therefore be in a position to give an exact description of “the way it was.” He would remove bias and cliché, our conception of how things had always been, our belief in how things ought to be, and replace them with the square-shouldered resoluteness of reality.
Out through the front of the tent he watched the glow of the fire when the night wind blew on it. It was a quiet night. The swamp was perfectly quiet. Nick stretched under the blanket comfortably. A mosquito hummed close to his ear. Nick sat up and lit a match. The mosquito was on the canvas, over his head. Nick moved the match quickly up to it. The mosquito made a satisfactory hiss in the flame. The match went out. Nick lay down again under the blankets. He turned on his side and shut his eyes. He was sleepy. He felt sleep coming. He curled up under the blanket and went to sleep.
Brevity may serve as the soul for wit, but it is far from performing such a service for simplicity. The economy of most of Hemingway’s writing is only an appearance. To shorten this passage, we could have encouraged the reader to infer more, and said: “The fire brightened when the night wind breathed upon it. The swamp was as quiet as the night.” If images, implications, and connectives are allowed, a condensation can be sought which is far from simple. “A mosquito sang in his ear so he sat and lit a match.” Matches do go quickly out. No need to mention that. Moreover, Nick could be put to sleep far less redundantly. But Hemingway needs to state the obvious and avoid suggestion, to appear to be proceeding step by step. He needs the clumsy reiteration. It makes everything seem so slow and simple, plain, even artless, male.
Hemingway’s search for the essential was characteristically American; that is, it was personal; he sought a correct account of his own experience, because anything less would be fraudulent and insincere. The simplifying came prior to the writing; it was to be built into the heart and the eye, into the man—hunting or fishing, running with the bulls, going to war, mastering his woman. On the whole, Hemingway’s work has not held up very well, and that is perhaps because he didn’t see or feel any more than he reports he felt or saw, because the way it was was really only Heming’s way.
According to Democritus, the atom was so simple it could not be divided, and that simplicity, Plato thought, was the source of the soul’s immortality. Only if you had parts could you come apart, and only if you came apart could you decay and die and disappear. Change itself, Parmenides argued, depended upon such minuscule divisions, but it required, in addition, the space to come apart in, for when separation occurred, something (which was a swatch of Nothing, in most cases) had to fill the breach in order to ensure that the cut would continue and not heal around the knife. So the atom remained an atom because it was a plenum and contained not even a trace of the real agent of decay: empty space.
Behind the search for the simple is a longing for the indivisible, the indestructible, the enduring. When a noun is reified, its elements fuse. It obtains an Essence. It becomes One, Primitive, Indefinable. Or, rather: any definition will be analytic. “God is good” is a version of “God is God.” A rose is a rose. Business is business. And that is that.
These ultimate simples were invisible, not because they were very, very small, but because they were very, very pure. Purity is a property of simplicity. It is often what is sought in seeking the simple. Atoms had no qualities. Atoms had nothing to say to the senses. Atoms were geometries. They had shapes; you could count them; they weighed; they fell through the Void like drops of rain; they rebounded; they combined; and when these combinations came undone, they remained as unaffected by their previous unions as any professional Don Juan.
Visibility is impurity. Invisibility belongs to the gods, to the immaculate Forms, to the primeval seeds. It is not morally pure, ethereal spirits but those ghosts clotted with crime who hang about like frozen smoke in the still air. The soul, as a penance, is encumbered with flesh. Thought is brought to us in terms that can’t help but demean it, as if our sincerities were written in neon. Sin and sensation together veil the truth. Simplicity serves the essential, so the simple style will stick to the plainest, most unaffected, most ordinary words; its sentences will be direct and declarative, following the basic grammatical forms; and to the understanding, it will seem to disappear into its world of reference, more modest than most ministers’ wives, and invisible as a perfect servant.
Memory, too, is a polluter. The purity of the maid lies not in an untorn hymen, which is simply a symbol, but in the fact that she brings to her husband’s embrace the memory of no other arms. The purity of the maid guarantees the purity of her husband’s line: that his son is his; no uncertified seed has fertilized her first, been there ahead of him to father the future with a past. A fair maid has no past. Her husband will form her, as though her breasts grew beneath his hands. So she shall wear white as a sign she is unsullied, suitable, and as ready as a turkey to be carved.
The ultimate simples which the early philosophers revered were near enough to numbers as to make the move from Materialism to Idealism a small step. The logician, in an exactly similar fashion, seeks the supreme, unfactorable unit to begin with, and to that unit he then applies his intuition of the first fundamental logical operation, namely addition. One, and then one more. One. And one. And one. Adam did no less. Like Roman numerals or a prisoner’s day. One. And one. Bars, mars, nicks, accumulating in the direction of an unapproachable infinity. Others argue that anything either Is (like a light switch, On) or it Isn’t (like a light switch, Off); that a yes or a no suffices. To build a machinelike mind. Plato’s Demiurge lets the right triangle flop about like a stranded fish, and in that way it forms squares, cubes, and other polyhedrons, or it spins itself into a cone (for a cone is a triangle revolving like a door), while this shape, pivoting on its peak, will turn itself, in turn, into a sphere. With every essential figure drawn and every atom formed, the remainder of the universe is easy.
At one extreme, then, we find mathematicians, logicians, and those quantitative scient
ists who shave with Occam’s razor; whose concepts have one (and only one) clear meaning; whose rules are unambiguous, and conclusions rigorously drawn; while, on the other hand, there are the pious craftsmen who think with their hands, reverence their materials, and build their own beds.
Simple as the simple is, and basic as butter is to French cuisine, it never seems to be nearby or abundant but has to be panned, like silver or gold, from a muddy stream. Surfaces have to be scrubbed, disguises divested, impurities refined away, truths extracted, luxuries rejected, seductions scorned, diversions refused, memories erased. Because if some things in life are simple, quite a lot is not; quite a bit is “buzzing, blooming confusion.” There is, of course, deception’s tangled web. There are the many mysteries of bureaucracy, the flight path of bees, the concept of the Trinity; there are the vagaries of the weather, the ins and outs of diplomacy, business, politics, adultery; there is poetry’s indirection, the opacity of German metaphysics, the ornamentation of Baroque churches, and the cast of the Oriental mind.
Simplicity is not a given. It is an achievement, a human invention, a discovery, a beloved belief.
In contrast to the bubbling stew we call our consciousness (and to reprise), there are the purities of reason, which require clear rules of inference and transparent premises; there are the invisible particles of matter, those underlying elements out of which the All is made Universal by the Few; there are nascent conditions of existence, unsullied by use or age or other kinds of decay; there are definitions brief and direct as gunshots; there are modes of being that streamline the soul for its afterlife flights. Consequently, beneath simplicity itself, whenever it serves as an ideal, lie moral and metaphysical commitments of considerable density. There are Hume’s simple impressions. There are Leibnitz’s monads. There are Lucretius’ jumpy atoms. Yet we do not behold the simple simply. If our gaze is direct, its object open, our climb to the mountain’s top is circuitous, the path perilous. If the foundations of Reality are simple, the grounds of Simplicity are complex.
Those who champion simplicity as a way of life are aware of the political and moral statement they are making. Gustav Stickley, who contributed so substantially to the Arts and Crafts Movement in America around the turn of the century, certainly was. For him, simplicity was not a Spartan lunch of caviar and champagne, or a lazy day sunning on the deck of the yacht. In his first collection of Craftsman Homes, Stickley writes:
By simplicity here is not meant any foolish whimsical eccentricity of dress or manner or architecture, colonized and made conspicuous by useless wealth, for eccentricity is but an expression of individual egotism and as such must inevitably be short-lived. And what our formal, artificial world of today needs is not more of this sort of eccentricity and egotism, but less; not more conscious posing for picturesque reform, but greater and quieter achievement along lines of fearless honesty; not less beauty, but infinitely more of a beauty that is real and lasting because it is born out of use and taste.
For Stickley, his movement’s heroic figure was an Englishman, Edward Carpenter, whose writings he much admired and frequently cites. England’s Ideal (which is the title of one of Carpenter’s books) appears to be agrarian, anticolonial, puritan, roundhead, and reformist. Our labor should not be a stranger to all that sustains us; our culture should be of our own contriving, and not something we have purchased in a shop; the true character of life ought not to be shamefully concealed; the head must have a hand, both to help it and to hold it in check. Possessions, in particular, are like unwanted immigrants—the first family to arrive is soon followed by boatloads of their relatives. Carpenter is vivid:
It cannot be too often remembered that every additional object in a house requires additional dusting, cleaning, repairing; and lucky you are if its requirements stop there. When you abandon a wholesome tile or stone floor for a Turkey carpet, you are setting out on a voyage of which you cannot see the end. The Turkey carpet makes the old furniture look uncomfortable, and calls for stuffed couches and armchairs; the couches and armchairs demand a walnut-wood table; the walnut-wood table requires polishing, and the polish bottles require shelves; the couches and armchairs have casters and springs, which give way and want mending; they have damask seats, which fade and must be covered; the chintz covers require washing, and when washed they call for antimacassars to keep them clean. The antimacassars require wool, and the wool requires knitting-needles, and the knitting-needles require a box, the box demands a side table to stand on and the carpet wears out and has to be supplemented by bits of drugget, or eked out with oilcloth, and beside the daily toil required to keep this mass of rubbish in order, we have every week or month, instead of the pleasant cleaning-day of old times, a terrible domestic convulsion and bouleversement of the household.
Of course, for the person who does not hear the Turkey carpet call for a stuffed couch, or rejects its demands for a walnut-wood table, or refuses to fill the table’s polishing requirements, or the bottle’s for a shelf, as if they were medical prescriptions; for such a person the growing snowball of belongings will never overtake and amalgamate the needs of the sagging seat or soiled cover; because the simplest thing to do with dust is never to disturb it, while wear can be watched with the same interest accorded to a sunset, and juxtapositions of hilarious quaintness or stylistic jar can often be appreciated as accurate images of the condition of life. Simplicity carries at its core a defensive neatness that despairs of bringing the wild world to heel and settles instead on taming a few things by placing them in an elemental system where the rules say they shall stay. Corners full of cupboards, nooks full of crannies, built-in shelves, seats, and drawers, deny each corresponding desire for change, for adjustment. They may begin as conveniences, but they end as impositions. It is their insistence that every function has its implement, every implement its place, every place its station, and every station its duties, as they wish the world does, and had, and did.
Labor-saving devices like the sewing machine, Carpenter argues, only provide more time for fashioning frills and flounces. Economy, like purity, like neatness, is one of simplicity’s principal ingredients. We must be frugal with what we have when what we have (of premises or provisions) is so limited; but we need to be frugal whether our possessions are many or few, because frugality is inherently virtuous. In describing economy’s consequences, Carpenter does not conceal the religious implications but records them, albeit with a saving smile.
For myself I confess to a great pleasure in witnessing the Economics of Life—and how seemingly nothing need be wasted; how the very stones that offend the spade in the garden become invaluable when footpaths have to be laid out or drains to be made. Hats that are past wear get cut up into strips for nailing creepers on the wall; the upper leathers of old shoes are useful for the same purpose. The under garment that is too far gone for mending is used for patching another less decrepit of its kind, then it is torn up into strips for bandages or what not; and when it has served its time thus it descends to floor washing, and is scrubbed out of life—useful to the end. When my coat has worn itself into an affectionate intimacy with my body, when it has served for Sunday best, and for week days, and got weather-stained out in the fields with the sun and rain—then faithful, it does not part from me, but getting itself cut up into shreds and patches descends to form a hearthrug for my feet. After that, when worn through, it goes into the kennel and keeps my dog warm, and so after lapse of years, retiring to the manure-heaps and passing out on to the land, returns to me in the form of potatoes for my dinner; or being pastured by my sheep, reappears upon their backs as the material of new clothing. Thus it remains a friend to all time, grateful to me for not having despised and thrown it away when it first got behind the fashions. And seeing we have been faithful to each other, my coat and I, for one round or life-period, I do not see why we should not renew our intimacy—in other metamorphoses—or why we should ever quite lose touch of each other through the aeons.
Just suppose, t
hough, that carelessness is the way of the world; that natural selection proceeds by means of an immense waste; that survival is hit or miss and fitness is genetic. Suppose that the deepest of energy’s rhythms are random, and that nature may conserve matter but callously use up each of its particular forms. Suppose that order is only a security blanket; that there are no essences; that substance is another philosophical invention like soul and spirit and ego and the gods, like mind and will and cause and natural law. Suppose that life will run every which way like a dispersed mob; that the words for life are “proliferation” and “opportunism,” and that ends are absent and meaning too, purposes pointless and pointlessness the rule: what will simplicity explain in such a case? what will it justify? how will its economies console? its purities protect? its neatness regulate?
So many simplicities! How is one to know where one is? what one has? We sometimes admire the naive directness of the primitive painter, failing to notice that what is attractive is often what is not there, rather than what is; and the simplicity we associate in the United States with the Shakers can be found in the mystically inspired Piet Mondrian, as well as in other artists for whom purity of color, line, and shape represents a holiness otherwise out of reach, although what each reaches is obscured behind a different mist; then there is the meditative simplicity of someone like Tanizaki, which seems to require only a cleared space, a bare screen, a benevolent silence, into which he can cast shadows like so many heavy sacks, or project a dance of light and mind, or provoke the mosquito into speaking, or prevail on the moon to wane; perhaps nearby we can place the duplicitous simplicity of the drape or curtain behind which plots may be planned, or bring out the bland expression that lids a kettle of seething rage, or maybe we can unfold a calm screen, like a newspaper held in front of our breakfast face, behind which caresses unscheduled by any passion can continue themselves to their self-canceling conclusion; while finally we must find a spot beside the psychological essentialism of a writer like Hemingway, or alongside the ontological researches of a painter like Bashō, where we can put the expressive simplicities of such minimalists as Samuel Beckett and Mark Rothko, who brood upon their motifs like Cézanne on his mountain, or Flaubert on his Bovary, until any silly little thing, so intensely attended to—as words often are, as symbols are, as bodies, as beliefs—until any ugly old tatter, attended to, touched by concern, becomes as full of the possible as an egg, an embryo, a soft explosion of sperm; and we stare at the striations of a stone, for instance, as at a star, as if time itself wore every scar the stone does, as if the rock were that world of which the poet so often speaks—that world made cunningly; that world held in the palm of the hand; that flower, wooden bowl, or grain of sand, of which the poet so often speaks—speaks to another world’s inattentive ear.
Finding a Form Page 32