Finding a Form (42 page)

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.

Just suppose, though, 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.

“Limitations of means determines style.” That is the pat answer to many a talk-show question. “With one hand tied behind my back …” is the common boast. The simple can be a show of strength; it can place a method or a bit of material under significant stress so as to see what it is capable of, what its qualities can achieve. In the small and simple atom is a frightful force, a heat equivalent to a nation’s hate, if it is unanimously released, as meaning in a lengthy sentence sometimes waits to the last syllable to explain itself, or a life of persistent disappointment bursts suddenly down the barrel of a gun, years of pent-up letdowns set loose.

Simplicity can be a boast—“See how I deprive myself”; it can be an emblem of holiness, a claim to virtues that might otherwise never be in evidence: the peasant-loving prince, the modest monarch, unspoiled star, humble savior, rich man’s downcast door. But most of all it is a longing: for less-beset days, for clarity of contrast
and against the fuddle of grays, for certainty and security, and the deeper appreciation of things made possible by the absence of distraction, confusion, anxiety, delay. Simplicity understands completeness and closure, the full circle, something we can swing a compass round, or—to hammer out the line—get really straight.

What it does not understand so well is exuberance, abundance, excess, gusto, joy, absence of constraint, boundless aspiration, mania, indulgence, sensuality, risk, the full of the full circle, variation, elaboration, difference, lists like this, deviousness, concealment, the pleasures of decline, laughter, polyphony, digression, prolixity, pluralism, or that the devil is the hero in the schemeless scheme of things. If our North Pole is Samuel Beckett and our South Pole is Anton Webern, our equator is made by François Rabelais with Falstaff’s belt.

Thinking now of how complex simplicity is, perhaps we have an answer (though I do not remember previously posing any question). Before the buzzing, blooming abundance of every day, facing the vast regions of ocean and the seemingly limitless stretch of empty space; or—instead—wincing at the news in the daily papers (you had not thought the world—as wide as earth, water, and air are—could contain so much crime, such immense confusion, this daunting amount of pain); or—instead—reading the novels of Henry James and James Joyce and Melville and Mann, or living in Proust or traveling in Tolstoy, you are again impressed by immensity, by the plethora of fact, by the static of statistics and the sheer din of data, by the interrelation of everything, by twists and turns and accumulations, as in this sentence going its endless way; yet as one proceeds in science, as one proceeds through any complex esthetic surface, as one proceeds, the numerous subside in the direction of the few (the Gordian knot is made, it turns out, of a single string), the power of number grasps vastness as though each Milky Way were the sneeze of a cicada; so that slowly perhaps, steadily certainly, simplicity reasserts itself. The simple sentence is achieved.

Thinking, then, of how simple complexity turns out to be, I can
understand, when we began with a bowl chipped from a bit of wood, how its innocence drew suitors. Simplicity disappeared the way a placid pool is broken when a bit of bread brings a throng of greedy carp to boil, or when the mind turns plain mud or simple wood into moving molecules, those into atoms orbiting alarmingly, these into trings, trons, and quarks, until the very mind that made them gives up trying to calculate their behavior. At such times, and in such times as these, don’t we desire the small garden into which we can carry our battered spirit, or perhaps a small room at the top of some tower, a hut in a forest, a minibike instead of a Toyota, a bit of smoked salmon on an impeccable leaf of lettuce, a small legacy from a relative long forgotten whose history is no burden and no embarrassment? only one servant?

Tanizaki explains to us how the high shine of lacquerware (whose surface under electric light is so harsh and vulgar) becomes softly luminous in the candlelight it was meant for; how the voluminous folds of a lady’s garment may hide her body from us, only to permit her to seduce us with her wit. He allows us to see that the simplest step is nevertheless a step in a complex series, a series whose sum is simple. Cultures are both complex and simple, the way the world is. Having reached that world, with the poet’s help, from a grain of sand, and found that stretch of sand peopled with every sort of sunbather, we must remember to disembody bather and sand again, to simplify the beach and its sighing surf, so that now we watch the water run up that sand, as full of foam as ale is, only to slow and subside and slip back into the sea again, leaving a line at each wave lap—a line as pure as a line by Matisse, a line as purely sensuous as the outline of some of those bathers, lying on a beach one grain of which we’d begun with, when we said we could see the world in a bit of grit.

T
o speak of the music of prose is to speak in metaphor. It is to speak in metaphor because prose cannot make any actual music. The music of prose has the most modest of inscriptions. Its notes, if we could imagine sounding them, do not have any preassigned place in an aural system. Hence they do not automatically find themselves pinned to the lines of a staff, or confined in a sequence of pitches. Nor is prose’s music made of sounds set aside and protected from ordinary use as ancient kings conserved the virginity of their daughters. In the first place, prose often has difficulty in getting itself pronounced at all. In addition, any tongue can try out any line; any accent is apparently okay; any intonation is allowed; almost any pace is put up with. For prose, there are no violins fashioned with love and care and played by persons devoted to the artful rubbing of their strings. There are no tubes to transform the breath more magically than the loon can by calling out across a lake. The producers of prose do not play scales or improve their skills by repeating passages of De Quincey or Sir Thomas Browne, although that might be a good idea. They do not work at Miss
iss ip pi
until they get it right. The sound of a word may be arbitrary and irrelevant to its meaning, but the associations created by incessant use are strong, so that you cannot make the sound
m o o n
without seeming to mean “moon.” By the time the noun has become a verb, its pronunciation will feel perfectly appropriate to the mood one is in when one moons, say, over a
girl, and the “moo” in the mooning will add all its features without feeling the least discomfort. In music, however, the notes are allowed to have their own way and fill the listeners’ attention with themselves and their progress. Nonmusical associations (thinking of money when you hear do-re-me played) are considered irrelevant and dispensable.