— But there’s the saying that we should do unto others as we’d like them to treat us. It’s in the Bible, I think.
— And it’s wrong. Have you ever heard me complain about a player who’s rough and mean? Do to others what they’re doing to you. When you’re on top of a return, naturally you’re going to feed it to the team, and naturally you’re going to feint, right? You’ve got Beyssac’s eye, and Beyssac is the last person you’re going to kick the ball to, and then you kick it to Beyssac.
— And the Red Lions always fall for it.
— Eh bien! Beside that little ruse we can put a phrase of Aristotle.
— Aristotle! Merde alors.
— Don’t laugh at Aristotle. It is precisely when we seem most modern that we are imitating the past. I love sport, its training and spirit, the more for knowing the classical world loved it. Aristotle said of gymnastics that they make a strategic mind, a healthy and prudent soul, and shape a liberal and courageous character. Aristotle would have said that of football, yes?
— He makes it all very moral, doesn’t he? Where’s the fun?
— The beauty of it is in the word liberal: an openness of spirit, an acceptance of the world. For the hour and a half of a game you’re freely consenting with a male and liberal heart to all the fire and sanctions of the game. You accept that the sun goes in when it might have got in the other team’s eyes, and that it blazes out when it’s in ours. You accept the wind going against you and its dying down when it might have been in your favor. You accept your team’s doing the opposite of what you know is the right play.
Peyrony listened with big eyes, eating grass.
The rain was letting up. Lévy-Bruhl stood, brushed hos sleeves with his hands, and nodded toward their path.
— Have you read Swedenborg? I mean, some of him.
— I see what you’re thinking. The primitive in his imagination, his globes of light and angles and geometrical heaven, can be found in poets and mystics, in Balzac and Baudelaire. Do you want primitive thought to be subsumed in the enlightened mind?
— Is there an enlightened mind?
— Leonardo, Locke, Voltaire, Aristotle.
— Darwin, the two Humboldts, Montaigne, none of whom built villages that are poems of symbols and ideas, like my Kanaka.
Peyrony smeared the rain on his legs, pulling his shorts back as far as they would wad.
— Your Labbé and the kid with the English hair obeyed your signals when they clearly thought they were cockeyed. In football you accept all the unnecessary strain and fatigue of going through hopeless plays, like when I tear off after a man I know is faster than I, for the satisfaction of knowing that I did my damnedest, eh? You accept it when Beyssac makes an end run and scores, when it was I, alone, who set up the play. You accept the referee’s idiot rulings. You try to protest and Raimondu, the shit, shouts me down. He was eighteen and I was twenty-five, and he was wrong and I was right, but I was already learning the truth of what Goethe said: an injustice is preferable to disorder.
— Myth, my ear Lucien, is not a narrative. It is life itself, the way a people live.
Peyrony tried to wash his face with rain from the grass.
— You’re merely rearranging the mud, Robinet said. It makes you look as wild as a savage, a nice savage. Are you listening to a word I’m saying?
— Goethe the football player.
— It’s in the hour and a half of the game that I know myself, you understand? I have to face all over again that I’m short of wind, that I let the ball get away from me, that I can’t kick straight half the time. I also know that I’m in a concentration of awesome power, a power that’s an electricity or the gift from a daimon, the mystery of form. It isn’t constant, it comes and goes, without reason or rule. My legs on the field scythe down all the hours of the rest of the day. I feel like a god, I feel reborn and new-made, and know all over again that the body has a soul of its own, independent of the other.
Lévey-Bruhl and Pastor Leenhardt came to the walk along the playing fields where they could see the boys resting in groups as colorful as signal flags on a ship.
— The word is the thing, Pastor Leenhardt said, or the word and thing are son inextricably together that the thing is sacred, as the word is, too. A man’s word, his yes or no, is the man. A liar is his lie.
— How we participate, Lévy-Bruhl said, stopping to thrust his hands in his pockets, how does not matter, for there are endless ways of participating. Surely the deepest participation is entirely symbolic, invisible, unmeasurable. I’m thinking of identity under differences, my Jewishness, your Protestant grounding. Neither of us ostensibly participates in French culture in my sense, and yet, keeping the remark between ourselves, we are French culture.
They could see boys straying from the fields, getting up from their bivouac, stretching tall, pulling up socks, shaking hands.
— You will find, I think, Pastor Leenhardt was saying, that all thought among primitives, and perhaps everywhere, begins with a perception of beauty.
— You mean form, symmetry, a coherence of pattern. The light is even lovelier after the rain.
— The past to the Kanaka is old light. The light in which the ancestors grew yams and made the villages into words.
— How many autumns will an old man see? asks a Japanese poet.
— Twilight in New Caledonia is only half an hour. Even so, it is understood to be in four movements. The first is when a dark blue appears in the grass, night’s first step. The second is when field mice awake and begin to come out of their burrows. The third is when the shadows are dark and rich and the gods can move about in them unseen. The fourth is night itself, when one cannot see the boundaries of the sacred places and there is no blame for not knowing that your foot is on the grass of the sanctuaries.
Veranda Hung with Wisteria
THE ADORATION OF MOUNTAINS, MR. POE READ IN ALEXANDER von Humboldt’s Cosmos, and the contemplation of flowers distinguish Chinese poetry from that of Greece and Rome. Ssu-ma Kuang, statesman and poet, described in his Garden, written around the time of the Norman invasion of England, his wide view of the river Kiang crowded with junks and sampans, the black green of the pines beyond his terrace of peonies and chrysanthemums, the blue green of the shrubbery, the red gold of the persimmons, while he expected with contentment the arrival of friends who would read their verses to him and listen to his.
ESSAYS
The Geography of the Imagination
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE PARTHENON AND THE WORLD TRADE Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all a difference of imagination.
Man was first a hunter, and an artist: his earliest vestiges tell us that alone. But he must always have dreamed, and recognized and guessed and supposed, all skills of the imagination. Language itself is continuously an imaginative act. Rational discourse outside our familiar territory of Greek logic sounds to our ears like the wildest imagination. The Dogon, a people of West Africa, will tell you that a white fox named Ogo frequently weaves himself a hat of string bean hulls, puts it on his impudent head, and dances in the okra to insult and infuriate God Almighty, and that there’s nothing we can do about it except abide him in faith and patience.
This is not folklore, or a quaint custom, but as serious a matter to the Dogon as a filling station to us Americans. The imagination; that is, the way we shape and use the world, indeed the way we see the world, has geographical boundaries like islands, continents, and countries. These boundaries can be crossed. That Dogon fox and his impudent dance came to live with us, but in a different body, and to serve a different mode of the imagination. We call him Brer Rabbit.
We in America are more sensitive than most to boundaries of the imagination. Our arrival was a second one; the misnamed first arrivers must still bear a name from the imaginat
ion of certain Renaissance men, who for almost a century could not break out of the notion that these two vast continents were the Indies, itself a name so vague as to include China, India, and even Turkey, for which they named our most delicious bird.
The imagination has a history, as yet unwritten, and it has a geography, as yet only dimly seen. History and geography are inextricable disciplines. They have different shelves in the library, and different offices at the university, but they cannot get along for a minute without consulting the other. Geography is the wife of history, as space is the wife of time.
When Heraclitus said that everything passes steadily along, he was not inciting us to make the best of the moment, an idea unseemly to his placid mind, but to pay attention to the pace of things. Each has its own rhythm: the nap of a dog, the precession of the equinoxes, the dances of Lydia, the majestically slow beat of the drums at Dodona, the swift runners at Olympia.
The imagination, like all things in time, is metamorphic. It is also rooted in a ground, a geography. The Latin word for the sacredness of a place is cultus, the dwelling of a god, the place where a rite is valid. Cultus becomes our word culture, not in the portentous sense it now has, but in a much humbler sense. For ancient people the sacred was the vernacular ordinariness of things: the hearth, primarily; the bed, the wall around the yard. The temple was too sacred to be entered. Washing the feet of a guest was as religious an act as sharing one’s meals with the gods.
When Europeans came to the new world, they learned nothing on the way, as if they came through a dark tunnel. Plymouth, Lisbon, Amsterdam, then the rolling Atlantic for three months, then the rocks and pines, sand and palms of Cathay, the Indies, the wilderness. A German cartographer working in Paris decided to translate the first name of Amerigo Vespucci into Latin, for reasons best known to himself, and call the whole thing America. In geography you have maps, and maps must have the names of places on them.
We new-world settlers, then, brought the imagination of other countries to transplant it in a different geography. We have been here scarcely a quarter of the time that the pharaohs ruled Egypt. We brought many things across the Atlantic, and the Pacific; many things we left behind: a critical choice to live with forever.
The imagination is like the drunk man who lost his watch, and must get drunk again to find it. It is as intimate as speech and custom, and to trace its ways we need to reeducate our eyes. In 1840 — when Cooper’s The Pathfinder was a bestseller, and photography had just been made practical — an essay called “The Philosophy of Furniture” appeared in an American magazine. Dickens made fun of Americans for attending lectures on the philosophy of anything, the philosophy of crime on Monday, the philosophy of government on Wednesday, the philosophy of the soul on Thursday, as Martin Chuzzlewit learned from Mrs. Brick. The English, also, we know from Thomas Love Peacock’s satirical novels, were addicted to the lecture. The great French encyclopedia, its imitators, and the periodical press had done their work, and audiences were eager to hear anybody on any subject. Crowds attended the lectures of Louis Agassiz on zoology and geology (in 1840 he was explaining the Ice Age and the nature of glaciers, which he had just discovered); of Emerson, of transcendentalists, utopians, home-grown scientists like John Cleve Symmes, of Cincinnati, who explained that the globe is open at the poles and another world and another humanity resident on the concavity of a hollow earth; and even Thoreau, who gave lectures in the basements of churches.
This “Philosophy of Furniture” was by an unlikely writer: Edgar Allan Poe. In it he explains how rooms should be decorated. “We have no aristocracy of the blood,” says this author who was educated at a university founded by Thomas Jefferson, “and having therefore as a natural, and indeed as an inevitable thing, fashioned for ourselves an aristocracy of dollars, the display of wealth has here to take the place and perform the office of the heraldic display in monarchial countries.”
We are familiar with Poe’s anxiety about good taste, about the fidelity of the United States to European models. What we want to see in this essay is a clue to the structure of Poe’s imagination, which Charles Baudelaire thought the greatest of the century, an imagination so fine that Paul Valéry said it was incapable of making a mistake.
Poe’s sense of good taste in decoration was in harmony with the best English style of the early Victorian period; we recognize his ideal room as one in which we might find the young Carlyles, those strenuous aesthetes, or George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell — a glory of wallpaper, figured rugs, marble-top tables, tall narrow windows with dark red curtains, sofas, antimacassars, vases, unfading wax flowers under bell jars, a rosewood piano, and a cozy fireplace. The amazing thing is that Poe emphasizes lightness and grace, color and clarity; whereas we associate his imagination with the most claustrophobic, dark, Gothic interiors in all of literature.
On our walls, Poe says, we should have many paintings to relieve the expanse of wallpaper — “a glossy paper of silver-grey tint, spotted with small arabesque devices of a fainter hue.” “These are,” he dictates, “chiefly landscapes of an imaginative cast — such as the fairy grottoes of Stanfield, or the lake of the Dismal Swamp of Chapman. There are, nevertheless, three or four female heads, of an ethereal beauty — portraits in the manner of Sully.”
In another evocation of an ideal room, in a sketch called “Landor’s Cottage” he again describes a wall with pictures: “ . . . three of Julien’s exquisite lithographs à trois crayons, fastened to the wall without frames. One of these drawings was a scene of Oriental luxury, or rather voluptuousness; another was a ‘carnival piece’, spirited beyond compare; the third was a Greek female head — a face so divinely beautiful, and yet of an expression so provokingly indeterminate, never before arrested my attention.”
Poe titled the collection of his stories published that year Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. These two adjectives have given critics trouble for years. Grotesque, as Poe found it in the writings of Sir Walter Scott, means something close to Gothic, an adjective designating the Goths and their architecture, and what the neoclassical eighteenth century thought? of mediæval art in general, that it was ugly but grand. It was the fanciful decoration by the Italians of grottoes, or caves, with shells, and statues of?ogres and giants from the realm of legend, that gave the word grotesque its meaning of freakish, monstrous, misshapen.
Arabesque clearly means the intricate, nonrepresentational, infinitely graceful decorative style of Islam, best known to us in their carpets, the geometric tile-work of their mosques, and their calligraphy.
Had Poe wanted to designate the components of his imagination more accurately, his title would have been, Tales of the Grotesque, Arabesque, and Classical. For Poe in all his writing divided all his imagery up into three distinct species.
Look back at the pictures on the wall in his ideal rooms. In one we have grottoes and a view of the Dismal Swamp: this is the grotesque mode. Then female heads in the manner of Sully: this is the classical mode. The wallpaper against which they hang is arabesque.
In the other room we had a scene of oriental luxury: the arabesque, a carnival piece spirited beyond compare (Poe means masked and costumed people, at Mardi Gras, as in “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Masque of the Red Death”): the grotesque, and a Greek female head: the classical.
A thorough inspection of Poe’s work will disclose that he performs variations and mutations of these three vocabularies of imagery. We can readily recognize those works in which a particular idiom is dominant. The great octosyllabic sonnet “To Helen,” for instance, is classical, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is grotesque, and the poem “Israfel” is arabesque.
But no work is restricted to one mode; the other two are there also. We all know the beautiful “To Helen, written when he was still a boy:
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicaean barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
<
br /> To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Lo! in yon brilliant window niche
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land!
The words are as magic as Keats, but what is the sense? Sappho, whom Poe is imitating, had compared a woman’s beauty to a fleet of ships. Byron had previously written lines that Poe outbyrons Byron with, in “the glory that was Greece / And the grandeur that was Rome.” But how is Helen also Psyche; who is the wanderer coming home? Scholars are not sure. In fact, the poem is not easy to defend against the strictures of critics. We can point out that Nicaean is not, as has been charged, a pretty bit of gibberish, but the adjective for the city of Nice, where a major shipworks was: Marc Antony’s fleet was built there. We can defend perfumed sea, which has been called silly, by noting that classical ships never left sight of land, and could smell orchards on shore, that perfumed oil was an extensive industry in classical times and that ships laden with it would smell better than your shipload of sheep. Poe is normally far more exact than he is given credit for.
That window-niche, however, slipped in from Northern Europe; it is Gothic, a slight tone of the grotto in this almost wholly classical poem. And the closing words, “Holy Land,” belong to the Levant, to the arabesque.
In “The Raven” we have a dominant grotesque key, with a vision of an arabesque Eden, “perfumed from an unseen censer / Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor,” and a grotesque raven sits on a classical bust of Pallas Athene. That raven was the device on the flag of Alaric the Visigoth, whose torch at Eleusis was the beginning of the end of Pallas’s reign over the mind of man. Lenore (a name Walter Scott brought from Germany for his horse) is a mutation of Eleanor, a French mutation of Helen.
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