Finding a Form (47 page)

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.

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:

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:

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.