Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  Though grave-diggers’ toil is long,

  Sharp their spades, their muscles strong,

  They but thrust their buried men

  Back in the human mind again.

  All our lines of language are like the rope in a tug of war: their referential character pulls them one way, in the direction of things and the material world, where “buried men” are covered corpses, no otherwise than fossil bones; while the conceptual side of our sentences drags them toward a realm of abstraction and considers them in their relation to other ideas: those, first of all, that define terms and tell us most matter-of-factly what it is to be buried, but only word for word; secondly, associations that have been picked up over time and use, like dust on travel clothes, and which shadow each essential sense to suggest, in this case, that death in one life is life in another; and, thirdly, those connections our own memories make—for instance, if these lines remind us of a few of Edwin Muir’s, and link us suddenly with a land frozen into flooring, a place whose planks are crossed, let’s say, by a miller’s daughter one cold winter’s day, in another country and in another poem, and where the implications for the buried are quite otherwise than those suggested by Yeats.

  But they, the powerless dead,

  Listening can hear no more

  Than a hard tapping on the sounding floor

  A little overhead

  Of common heels that do not know

  Whence they come or where they go

  And are content

  With their poor frozen life and shallow banishment.

  Our own awareness, too, is always being drawn toward its objects, as if it were being sung to by sirens, at the same time that it’s withdrawing, in the company of the cautious self-regarding self, into the safe citadel of the head; unless, of course, desire is doing the driving, for then the same sensation that is sharply focused on the being of another (an exposed chest, a piece of moist cake) will find itself inside of hunger’s stomach.

  These brief considerations should be sufficient to suggest that the word may be troubled by the same ontological problems which plagued Descartes (and all of us who inherited his hobbies): there are two poles to the person which are pulling the person apart, namely mind—meaning and mathematics—inside the circle of the self, and body—spatial location and mechanics—within the determined realm of things. A book is such a bodied mind. Descartes described these spheres (in the way, it seemed to him, accuracy required) as so separate, so alien from each other (for consciousness is no-thing, is no-where, and its reasoning powers, if we confine ourselves to those, are correctly exercised in free souls like ourselves in precisely the same way, just as mathematical proofs proceed, not in consequence of coercion, but from rational rule; whereas matter is unfree, fixed, almost entirely engaged in occupancy, and a tribute to cause and effect)—indeed, as so opposed in every character and quality—that we might naturally wonder how self and world could combine, meet, or merely hail each other if they are at such ontological odds; and we have seen, as I have said, how bodylike the book is, how mindlike the text, and if Descartes’s critics complained that he had made of us a ghost in a machine, we might now understand the text as thought slipped warmly between cold sheets, elusive as a spirit, since its message cannot be injured by ripping up its pages or destroyed by burning its book. Dog-earing can do no damage to the significance of the sign, according to the Cartesian division; nor can the cruel reader’s highlight pen clarify obscurity, a check mark change a stress, or an underline italicize a rhyme. This bifurcation of reality can be made persuasive, yet does our experience allow us to believe it?

  Of course we continue to call them copies, as if there were an exemplar still and every book were but a vassal of its Lord, an Adam to its Maker. This medieval scheme is gone; nor are books copied piecemeal anymore, the way translators seize on a huge work of Herman Wouk’s, turning it, chapter by chapter, into several forms of Japanese; rather, the book is an object of mass production like a car (there is no first Ford), and both language and printing confer upon it a redoubtable generality to accompany its spiritual sameness. Like citizens in our country, all copies are truly equal, although this one, signed by the author, is somewhat more valuable; and this one, from the original edition, is to be preferred to all subsequent impressions; and this one, bound beautifully and illustrated by Picasso, is priceless (see, it’s wrapped in tissue); and this one, dressed in vulgar colors and pretending to be a bosom, not a book, like a whore flaunting its contents while ashamed of its center, asks to be received as nothing but an object, a commodity for learning or for leisure use, certainly not as a holy vessel, a container of consciousness, but instead as a disposable duplicate, a carbonless copy, another dollar bill, and not as a repository for moments of awareness, for passages of thought—states which, we prefer to believe, make us most distinctly us.

  Descartes endeavored (it was a futile try) to find a meeting point for mind and matter, a place where they might transact some business, but consciousness could not be moored to a material mast like some dirigible, and his famous gland could not reside in both realms at once, or be a third thing, neither one nor tuther, not with realities so completely contrary. Yet if he had looked inside his Cogito instead of pursuing its ergo to its sum, he would have found the simple, unassuming token, made of meaningless ink as its page is of flattened fibers, to which, in a formal yet relaxed way, were related both a referent in the world and a meaning in the mind. It was not that world; it was not that mind. Both had to happen along and find their union in the awareness of the reader.

  Normally, we are supposed to say farewell to the page even as we look, to see past the cut of the type, hear beyond the shape of the sound, feel more than the heft of the book, to hear the bird sing whose name has been invoked, and think of love being made through the length of the night if the bird’s name is the nightingale; but when the book itself has the beauty of the bird, and the words do their own singing; when the token is treated as if it, not some Divine intention, was holy and had power; when the bird itself is figured in the margins as though that whiteness were a moon-bleached bough and the nearby type the leaves it trembles; and when indigo turbans or vermilion feathers are, with jasmines, pictured so perfectly that touch falls in love with the finger, eyes light, and nostrils flare; when illustrations refuse to illustrate but instead suggest the inside of the reader’s head, where a consciousness is being constructed; then the nature of the simple sign is being vigorously denied, and the scene or line or brief rendition is being treated like a thing itself, returning the attention again and again to its qualities and its compositon.

  If it’s ever spring again,

  Spring again,

  I shall go where went I when

  Down the moor-cock splashed, and hen,

  Seeing me not, amid their flounder,

  Standing with my arm around her;

  If it’s ever spring again,

  Spring again,

  I shall go where went I then.

  What is this as-if “if”? It is as if the tokens were rebelling against their simple dispensable utilitarian status; it is as if they were appealing to the meanings they ostensibly bear by saying, “Listen, hear how all of me helps you, for I won’t let you merely declare your intention to return to a place and a time when you saw the moor-cock amorous with his hen and held your own love fast in tribute to him, but I shall insist that my very special music become meaning too, so that none of me, not a syllable of my substance, shall be left behind like an insignificant servant, because, as you can hear and see and feel, I am universal too, I am mind, and have ideal connections.”

  Yet it is only a longstanding philosophical prejudice to insist on the superiority of what are called the “higher” abstract general things, for they feel truly ghostly, orphaned, without even a heaven to make a shining mark on, and beseech the material world to give them a worthy home, a residence they may animate and make worthwhile; they long to be some-thing, to be some-place, to
know the solidity and slow change of primal stuff, so they—these ideas, these designs—will rush into the arms of Thomas Hardy’s lines and, instead of passing away into one realm or other, will remain and be repeated by us, revisited as the poet revisits that meadow full of springtime: “I shall go where went I when.” Like a kite, the poem rises on the wind and longs to be off, yet the line holds, held by the page—though pulling to be away, required to remain.

  Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,

  Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,

  Its formula escapes you, it has lost

  The certainty that constitutes a thing.

  This stanza of Auden’s describing “Brussels in Winter” discloses what rhymes do: they mate; they mate meanings on the basis of a common matter. On the basis of an accidental resemblance argue common blood. Through this absurd connection, they then claim equivalent eloquence for the mute as for the vocal.

  Only the old, the hungry and the humbled

  Keep at this temperature a sense of place,

  And in their misery are all assembled;

  The winter holds them like an Opera-House.

  Rows of words become the frozen scene, while the scene is but the sounds the syllables align.

  Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night

  Where isolated windows glow like farms,

  A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,

  A look contains the history of man,

  And fifty francs will earn a stranger right

  To take the shuddering city in his arms.

  Rhymes ball their signs like snow, then throw for fun the hard-packed contents of the fist at the unwary backside of a friend, who will nonetheless laugh when he receives the blow.

  It was Emerson who wrote:

  He builded better than he knew;—

  The conscious stone to beauty grew.

  The stone is carved by the consciousness of the carver. That way consciousness achieves the dignity of place, and the stone overcomes its cold materiality and touches spirit.

  The oscillation of interest between “thing” and “thought” inside the sign is complemented by a similar vibration in consciousness, inasmuch as we are eager to lose ourselves in our experience, enjoy what Nietzsche called a Dionysian drunkenness, and become one with what we know; but we are also anxious to withdraw, observe ourselves observing, and dwell in what Nietzsche said was a dream state but I prefer to imagine is made of the play of the mind, an Apollonian detachment, the cool of the critical as it collects its thoughts within the theater of the head.

  The book contains a text. A text is words, words, more words. But some books want to be otherwise than cup to coffee at the diner’s anonymous counter. That’s what I’ve so far said. They want to be persons, companions, old friends. And part of their personality naturally comes from use. The collector’s copy, slipcased and virginal, touched with gloves, may be an object of cupidity but not of love. I remember still a jelly stain upon the corner of an early page of Treasure Island. It became the feared black spot itself, and every time I reread that wonderful tale, I relived my first experience when, my morning toast in a negligent tilt, I saw Blind Pew approaching, tapping down the road, and Billy Bones, in terror of what he might receive, holding out a transfixed hand. I licked the dab of jelly from the spotted page.

  I scribbled many a youthfully assured “shit!” in my earliest books, questioning Pater’s perspicacity, Spengler’s personality, or Schopenhauer’s gloom (even if marginally), but such silly defacements keep these volumes young, keep them paper playthings still, in their cheap series bindings and pocket-book-colored covers, so that now they are treasures from a reading time when books were, like a prisoner’s filched tin spoon, utensils of escape, enlargements of life, wonders of the world—more than companions; also healers, friends. One is built of such books, such hours of reading, adventures undertaken in the mind, lives held in reverential hands.

  In a book bin at the back of a Goodwill store in St. Louis, I come upon a copy of The Sense of Beauty. By what route did Santayana’s first work reach this place? We scarcely wonder what wallet has previously enclosed the dollar bill we’re on the brink of spending, but I at least get romantic about the vicissitudes of such voyages, about hurt spines, dust, thumbprints on certain sheets, wear and tear, about top edges that have faded, and feel that some texts age like fine wine in their pages, waiting for the taste of the right eye, the best time. Pure texts have no such life. Only their tokens, and the books that keep them safe, wallow in the world.

  Decorations did not always dirty the word by disgracing its depth and subtlety with lazy loops, silly leaves and flowers, poorly imagined scenes, or with characters as crudely drawn as most comics. Nor were banal texts invariably embarrassed by leather bindings, complex enclosing borders, and initial letters as elaborately tacky as a Christmas tree. The better matches were reminders of the Book’s ideal: to realize within its covers a unity of type and token, the physical field supplying to its pastured words the nutrients they need to flourish, and actually making the text serve the design of a beautiful thing, while that object itself becomes something of a symbol, enlarging on the significance of the text and reminding the reader where his imagination belongs—on that page where “a phrase goes packed with meaning like a van.”

  If, then, the miseries of metaphysics are to be found in author, book, and reader, as well as in the whole unheeding world, and if, as its geometry suggests, a book is built to be, like a building, a body for the mind, we might usefully peer into that head where the text will sometime sound and see what elements need to be combined to complete its creation and its containment of a consciousness.

  Clearly, the epistemological passage begins with the kind of awareness of the world and its regulations which the writer of our text achieves. When a thing is seen, it says its name and begs to be perceived as fully and richly as possible, because sensing of any kind transforms its innocent object, as Rilke so often wrote, into an item in consciousness: that stone jug, standing on a trestle table, gray as the wood, its lip white with dried milk; or the old mill whose long stilled wheel showers every thought about it with the tossed fall of its working water; or the worn broom, dark with oil and dust, leaning now like a shadow in a corner, quietly concerned about who will take hold of it next; and birdcall, of course, and the smell of anciently empty dresser drawers, the coarse, comforting feel of dark bread between the teeth—would any of these qualities be realized: rage in a face, print on a page, valley filled with fog, would these? the dissolve of cheese into its toast and the tongue’s thoughtful retrieval of it, would that? or a cricket’s click, your tentatively touched thigh, slow coast of skin, calm water, or the cat’s contented sigh, would they? without the valiantly alert observer, dedicated to the metamorphosis of matter into mind, with the obligation to let nothing escape his life, never to let slip some character of things: the way wood wears at corners, or rust grows rich, lamps stand on carpets, and whistles trail away at the end of an expelled breath, a little like the affection they sometimes invite; it would all be missed, our own speech too, the complexity of an animal’s posture or a sock’s sag, that wrinkle beneath the eye which wasn’t there last Saturday, each gone, along with the momentary and ineffable softness of cloth a fat bus driver has all day sat on, the lost expression of faces surprised in a mirror, surprised to see they are not themselves, and—my god—all those clouds … if they were not first brought, as treasures are, into some sensory fulfillment.

  Our ideal writer will naturally understand that experience is everywhere toned by our mood, soothed or inflamed by immediate feeling, and that these emotions are modified by what we see or think or imagine, so that sometimes new ones will emerge. I take an emotion to be a perception of the relation of the self to other things: fear or hate when they threaten me or mine, jealousy when I am faced with loss, envy when I wish I had someone else’s talent, luck, or favor, love when I identify my own well-being
with another’s, then more generally, loneliness as a recognition that I am not sought or valued by my environment, alienation when I believe I have no real relation to the world, happiness when sufficiently deluded, melancholy when I see no possibility of improvement in my affairs, and so on. About these judgments a person may be correct or mistaken. And our ideal writer will be right about hers, able to empathize with those of others, and be adept at measuring how feeling deforms things or how cannily it makes most of its assessments.

  Thought is another essential character in consciousness, going on sometimes at a tangent to perception or in indifference to emotion (as philosophers like to brag it ought), though, if I am right about one of the functions of awareness, each and every element is cognitive; and it is a fortunate person, indeed, who has feelings the head trusts, and perceptions his other faculties can count on. I can feel persecuted and be deceived; I can see snakes and be D.T.’d; I can believe in my project of squaring the circle and be deluded; and we do know people who can’t get anything right, who marry wrong, who embrace a superstition and call it faith, whose perceptions lack clarity, color, and depth, and who have never once heard the horn in the forest. Such a person might very well wish to possess the character of a good sentence.

  For the most part, our formal thought goes on in words: in what we say to ourselves, in the sotto voce language I have already spoken of. Plainly, a meditative person will need the data his perception furnishes and the support which sound emotions lend; but he will, in addition to the disciplines of logic, mathematics, and the scientific method, need to possess a rich vocabulary, considerable command of it, and the fruit (in facts and their relations, in words and theirs) of much skilled and careful reading, because reading is the main way we discover what is going on in others; it is the knothole in the fence, your sight of my secrets, my look at what has been hidden behind your eyes, since our organs are never shared, cannot be lent or borrowed. In order to be known, we speak. Even to ourselves.