Finding a Form
Page 37
We must notice our drives, our desires, our needs, next, although they are always calling attention to themselves. They put purpose in our behavior, position the body in the surf, urge us to overcome obstacles or make hay while the sun shines. And whatever we desire, Hobbes says, we call good, and whatever we are fearful of and loathe, we insist is bad, avoiding it even if at cost. These are cognitions, too, and we discover, when we realize our aims, whether we were right to want to go home again or were once more disappointed in the pie, the place, the conversation, and the trip.
Finally, in addition to our passions, purposes, and perceptions, the skills and deftness of our brains, there is what Coleridge called the esemplastic power—that of the creative imagination. As I am defining it, the imagination is comparative, a model maker, bringing this and that together to see how different they are or how much the same. The imagination prefers interpenetration. That’s its sex. It likes to look through one word at another, to see streets as tangled string, strings as sounding wires, wires as historically urgent words, urgent words as passing now along telephone lines, both brisk and intimate, strings which draw, on even an everyday sky, music’s welcome staves.
Having read the classics closely, the inner self with honesty, and the world well—for they will be her principal referents—the writer must perform the second of our transformations: that of replacing her own complex awareness with its equivalence in words. That is, the sentence that gets set most rightly down will embody, in its languid turns and slow unfolding, or in its pell-mell pace and pulsing stresses, the imperatives of desire or the inertia of a need now replete; it will seize its subject as though it were its prey, or outline it like a lover, combining desire with devotion, in order to sense it superbly, neglecting nothing its nature needs; it will ponder it profoundly, not concealing its connections with thought and theory, in order to exhibit the play, the performance, of mind; and it will be gentle and contemplative, if that is called for, or passionate and rousing, if that’s appropriate, always by managing the music, filling each syllable with significance like chocolates with cream, so that every sentence is a bit of mindsong and a fully animated body made of muscle movement, ink, and breath.
Lastly, as if we had asked Santa for nothing yet, the adequate sentence should be resonant with relations, raise itself like Lazarus though it lies still upon the page, as if—always “as if”—it rose from “frozen life and shallow banishment” to that place where Yeats’s spade has put it “back in the human mind again.”
How otherwise than action each is, for even if—always “even”—always “if”—I preferred to pick the parsley from my potatoes with a knife and eat my peas before all else, I should have to remember that the right words must nevertheless be placed in their proper order: i.e., parsley, potatoes, and peas … parsley, potatoes, and peas … parsley, potatoes, and peas.
That is to say, the consciousness contained in any text is not an actual functioning consciousness; it is a constructed one, improved, pared, paced, enriched by endless retrospection, irrelevancies removed, so that into the ideal awareness which I imagined for the poet, who possesses passion, perception, thought, imagination, and desire and has them present in amounts appropriate to the circumstances—just as, in the lab, we need more observation than fervor, more imagination than lust—there is introduced patterns of disclosure, hierarchies of value, chains of inference, orders of images, natures of things.
When Auden, to return to him, “Lullaby”s this way:
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
he puts a most important pause—“my love”—between “head” and “human,” allowing the latter to become a verb, and then, by means of an artfully odd arrangement, resting the m’s and a’s and n’s softly on the a’s and m’s and r’s.
Of course we can imagine the poet with a young man’s head asleep on an arm which the poet knows has cushioned other lovers equally well, and will again; and we can think of him, too, as considering how beautiful this youth is, and pondering the fleeting nature of his boyish beauty, its endangerment now calmly ignored:
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral: But in
my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Yet it is scarcely likely that Auden’s contemplating mind ran on just this way, making in that very moment the pun on “lie,” or creating that delicious doubled interior rhyme “but to me/The entirely,” which so perfectly confirms the sentiment. It’s probable that the poet, passion spent, looked down on his lover in a simple sog of sympathy. Later, he recalled his countless climbs into bed, in sadness at their passing, perhaps, but with a memory already resigned, recollecting, too, certain banal routines, in order, on some small notebook’s handy page, to cause a consciousness to come to be that’s more exquisite, more—yes—entire, and worthy of esteem, than any he actually ever had, or you, or me.
What the poem says is not exceptional. This midnight moment will pass, this relationship will die, this boy’s beauty will decay, the poet himself will betray his love and lie; but none of that fatal future should be permitted to spoil the purity of the poet’s eye as it watches now, filled with “every human love.” Nor can we compliment Auden’s art by repeating Pope, that what it says has been “ne’er so well express’d,” because that formula misses what has so beautifully been given us: a character and quality of apprehension.
Sentences, I’ve said, are but little shimmied lengths of words endeavoring to be similar stretches of human awareness: they are there to say I know this or that, feel thus and so, want what wants me, see the sea sweep swiftly up the sand and seep away out of sight as simply as these sibilants fade from the ear; but such sentences present themselves in ranks, in paginated quires, in signatures of strength; they bulk up in the very box that Cartesian geometry has contrived for it, to stand for the body that has such thoughts, such lines that illuminate a world, a world that is no longer their author’s either, for the best of writing writes itself, as though the avalanche, in falling from the side of its mountain, were to cover the earth like paint from a roller rather than sweeping it clean or crushing objects like old sweethearts in its path.
How wrong it is to put a placid, pretty face upon a calm and tragic countenance. How awful also to ignore the essential character, the profounder functions, of the container of consciousness—to think of it even as a box from which words might be taken in or out—for I believe it is a crime against the mind to disgrace the nature of the book with ill-writ words or to compromise well-wrought ones by building for them tawdry spaces in a tacky house. “The book form,” Theodor Adorno writes,
signifies detachment, concentration, continuity: anthropological characteristics that are dying out. The composition of a book as a volume is incompatible with its transformation into momentary presentations of stimuli. When, through its appearance, the book casts off the last reminder of the idea of a text in which truth manifests itself, and instead yields to the primacy of ephemeral responses, the appearance turns against the book’s essence, that which it announces prior to any specific context … the newest books [have] become questionable, as though they have already passed away. They no longer have any self-confidence; they do not wish themselves well; they act as though no good could come of them.… The autonomy of the work, to which the writer must devote all his energies, is disavowed by the physical form of the work. If the book no longer has the courage of its own form, then the power that could justify that form is attacked within the book itself as well. [“Bibliographical Musings,” translated by S. W. Nicholson, Grand Street, 39: 136–7.]
It remains for the reader to realize the text, not only by reachieving the consciousness some works create (since not all books are bent on that result), but by
appreciating the unity of book/body and book/mind that the best books bring about; by singing to themselves the large, round lines they find, at the same time as they applaud their placement on the page, their rich surroundings, and everywhere the show of taste and care and good custom—what a cultivated life is supposed to provide; for if my meal is mistakenly scraped into the garbage, it becomes garbage, and if garbage is served to me on a platter of gold by hands in gloves, it merely results in a sardonic reminder of how little gold can do to rescue ruck when ruck can ruin whatever it rubs against; but if candlelight and glass go well together, and the linens please the eye as though it were a palate, and one’s wit does not water the wine, if one’s dinner companions are pleasing, if the centerpiece does not block the view and its flowers are discreet about their scent, then whatever fine food is placed before us, on an equally completed plate, will be enhanced, will be, in such a context, only another successful element in the making of a satisfactory whole; inasmuch as there is nothing in life better able to justify its follies, its inequities, and its pains (though there may be many its equal) than in getting, at once, a number of fine things right; and when we read, too, with our temper entirely tuned to the text, we become—our heads—we become the best book of all, where the words are now played, and we are the page where they rest, and we are the hall where they are heard, and we are, by god, Blake, and our mind is moving in that moment as Sir Thomas Browne’s about an urn, or Yeats’s spaded grave; and death can’t be so wrong, to be feared or sent away, the loss of love wept over, or our tragic acts continuously regretted, not when they prompt such lines, not when our rendering of them brings us together in a rare community of joy.
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Cambridge University Press: Excerpt from Human, All Too Human by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, copyright © 1986 by Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.: Excerpts from Aura by Carlos Fuentes, translated by Lysander Kemp, copyright © 1965 by Carlos Fuentes; excerpts from The Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kiš, translated by Michael Henry Heim, copyright © 1989 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
Grand Street: Excerpt from “Bibliographical Musings” by Theodor Adorno (Grand Street, vol. 39, pp. 469–70). Reprinted by permission of Grand Street.
Harcourt Brace & Company: Excerpts from “Flowering Judas” in Flowering Judas and Other Stories by Katherine Anne Porter, copyright © 1930, copyright renewed 1958 by Katherine Anne Porter. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company.
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: Excerpt from “Gazebo” in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver, copyright © 1981 by Raymond Carver; excerpt from “Sunday Morning” in Collected Poems by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1923, copyright renewed 1951 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
New Directions Publishing Corp.: Excerpt from “Portrait d’Une Femme” in Personae by Ezra Pound, copyright © 1926 by Ezra Pound; excerpt from “Canto XVII” in The Cantos of Ezra Pound by Ezra Pound, copyright © 1934, 1938 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Oxford University Press, Inc., and Faber and Faber Limited: Excerpt from “Scotland’s Winter” in Collected Poems by Edwin Muir (eight lines, pp. 229–30), copyright © 1960 by Willa Muir. Rights in Canada administered by Faber and Faber Limited, London. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc., and Faber and Faber Limited.
Laurence Pollinger Limited: Excerpts from “The Spinner and the Monks” in Sea and Sardinia by D. H. Lawrence. Reprinted by permission of Laurence Pollinger Limited and the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli.
Quartet Books Ltd.: Excerpts from Forbidden Territory by Juan Goytisolo, translated by Peter Bush (London: Quartet Books Ltd., 1989). Reprinted by permission of Quartet Books Ltd.
Random House, Inc.: Excerpts from “Brussels in Winter” and “Lullaby” in W. H. Auden: Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson, copyright © 1940, copyright renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
Viking Penguin: Excerpts from Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, copyright © 1939 by James Joyce, copyright renewed 1967 by Giorgio Joyce and Lucia Joyce. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.
Walker and Company: Excerpt from At Swim Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien, copyright © 1951, 1966 by Brian O’Nolan. Reprinted by permission of Walker and Company, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. All rights reserved.