Quarrel & Quandary (22 page)

As a reward for such precision of celestial engineering, a divine Hand long ago placed a diamond at the tip of the Little Dipper’s handle. The diamond is called Polaris: the North Star, which connects the sky’s seas with the earth’s seas. For thousands of years before there were compasses, sailors fixed on Polaris to map the way from here to there, and back again. Without the ladle there would have been no navigation, no trade, no cross-culturalization. Without the ladle, how would Greece have learned geometry from Egypt? How would the alphabet have voyaged from the land of the Semites across the Mediterranean to Europe? How would Marco Polo have met the silkworm in China?

The ladle is, after all, the ultimate cosmic receptacle. It dips into knowledge and brings up wisdom, in the shape of a hundred images. The ladle
is
image: it is configuration in all its variety. It is the world’s well. “Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?” Thomas Mann asks in
Joseph and His Brothers
. Leave off the handle on occasion, or attach it afterward if you like, and you have scooped up a universe of stories. For Joseph, the ladle had no handle; it was a pit, out of which he rose
to sit at the right hand of Pharaoh. For Joseph’s father, Jacob, the ladle kept its handle, and went down into the bucket that Rachel drew up from the well in Haran to water Jacob’s sheep and win his strenuous love. Isaac, Jacob’s father, dug three wells—their names were Esek, Sitnah, and Rehoboth—in remembrance of the wells his father Abraham had dug a generation before.

With its handle attached, the ladle is always activist: it will delve, scoop, dip, gouge, shovel, excavate. It will fetch up a mess of vegetables from the maw of a stewpot. Or an archaeological plinth; or a shard of what was itself once a Middle Bronze dipper.

Without its handle, the ladle can be laid-back, hammocklike, a cradle (the rhyme is, at least in the etymology of the psyche, plainly no accident): it can be the cavity of a crescent moon for Wynken, Blynken, and Nod to lie in. It can be civilized or primitive, enameled or rough, utilitarian or luxuriant. It can be tank, vat, barrel, keg, cask, or stoup; it can be urn or calabash shell, bowl or basin, silver salver or Shaker firkin, Roman simpulum or Greek kyathos. It can be Ali Baba’s jars to catch forty thieves in. It can be Tom Sawyer’s scary cave. It can be the tunnel of love.

Hook the handle on again, and it can become the long haft of a fountain pen terminating in a well of black ink.

And just here we come (though for most of us the fountain pen has been superseded by the compact cavern of the computer, with its interior cybernetic cosmos)—we come to the ladle’s deepest work: deeper than the ocean floor, deeper than the reach of the heavenly Dippers, deeper, in a way, than history itself. This is the ladle as it dips down, down, down into memory and imagination, into the bottomlessness of the word. It is the enchanted ladle that storytellers and writers grasp, or hope to grasp. Its handle (or hilt) is as long as the record of human habitation on our planet—or, some might wish to say, as long as thought and insight, as long as music and mathematics and science and art. And at the end of this longest handle of all is the
dipper, the scoop, the vessel that raises up from the poet’s or the philosopher’s well something deeper, and higher, than we knew we knew.

Once upon a time there really used to be an inkwell and a dipper; I recollect it myself. In my childhood every elementary-school desk had, in its upper right corner, a round hole into which would fit a round glass cup. The ink monitor—generally a self-important factotum—filled the cup weekly, from a large glass bottle. Invariably the ink would spill and stain the wooden desk. We pupils dipped our pens (metal nibs in wooden slots) and were drilled in “penmanship,” and dipped our pens again. Every few words necessitated a fresh dip. The inkwell was not deep—yet every year, as the grades ascended, it deepened. It deepened with
Travels with a Donkey;
it deepened with “Ode to the West Wind”; it deepened with Ichabod Crane.

And the well of sensibility goes on deepening, the ladle goes on dipping. A month or so ago I heard a man my own age, a brilliant editor—of books, and also of a famous magazine—scoop up out of his mind a lifetime’s worth of ecstatic reading, novel after novel. His brain was mobbed with literature; the remembering dipper fetched and fetched. What a pity, he said at last, that all this joyful mental stock is impermanent; ephemeral; it will go to waste; it will vanish when I vanish.

That same week I saw a newborn infant, and marveled at how perfectly it was formed, a complete human simulacrum; but it had no mental stock at all. It was a freshly made ladle: a replenishing ladle ready soon enough to dip into pictures and melodies and rhymes. The well of stories and ideas is eternal. But the ladle must be renewed. So decrees the Hand that put the diamond on the Little Dipper.

To ask the question “What is poetry about?” is different from asking what
poems
are about. “Poems,” in the plural, will mean an aggregate of individual poems—and despite the bundling together, we think of singularity: one poem, and then another poem, and then another. Each poem is the unique vessel of its own intent, focus, tone, theme, language, discovery, astonishment. A poem is “a” or “the” poem: it resists category, except perhaps the category of form. A poem may consent to being called a haiku, or a sonnet, or a villanelle; it may be content to being called “free,” and once upon a time—a time that now begins to take on a kind of autumnal browning—it was delighted to stand under the eaves of the term “modern.” And still it is possible, or nearly possible, to say what any single poem is “about”—although a poem may be less about what it is about, and more about its intimations, its penumbra, its scent, its own hiddenness or elusiveness. A poem is “edgelit,” to borrow a word from Adrienne Rich.

So if we can say, even if only more or less, what a single poem is about, can we say what “poetry” is about? Is “poetry” a collective? Is it a plural? Is it a universe? Is it an emanation, and if so, an emanation of what? From what does it derive? Is it endemic in our biological being, like the human hand with its opposable
thumb? Does it belong to song, or is it the child, or perhaps the parent, of philosophy?

Turn for a moment from poetry to pots. The archaeologist’s pots: vessels to store grain in, or mead, or wine; vessels to cook with, over an open fire. Pots have been the intimate companions of humankind since humankind evolved; pots
define
humankind. They are present, omnipresent, in every human culture. Utility ordained that the prehistoric clay pot would indeed be a pot: a concave object. Utility also prescribed a base suitable for standing or storage or shipping, and often enough, when it was to the purpose, a spout, a lid, a handle or a pair of handles. But utility did not contemplate imaginative departures and additions of form, it did not envision the fanciful shapes of animals or birds; and utility did not demand decorative design, coarser in one culture, more brilliantly complex in another. The drive to mark the most ordinary articles with the impress of art was and is humanly universal and appears to be humanly innate. Always and everywhere, art attaches itself to the utilitarian.

And not only to the utilitarian. Even, and especially, to the imagery of the divine: so that, from Osiris and Ishtar to Athena and Zeus, from Vishnu and Shiva to Buddha and Jesus, there has been figuration. Art may have gravitated to utensils, mere utensils, to express a human drive; but it
inhabited
religion—or put it that religion inhabited art. The thousands of talismans unearthed in the excavations of extinct settlements; the monumental sculptures of ancient Egypt; the towering statue of Athena in the Parthenon; the torrent of Christian carvings and paintings, both Western and Eastern, and the talismanic cross and crucifix; the manifold Hindu representations of deities; the serene Buddha-busts, both mammoth and domestic—all these testify to religion’s habitation in art. Through the ministrations of art, concept became concrete, idea turned into thing, mystery
metamorphosed into matter. Some may regard this nearly universal flood of representation as a tribute to the human imagination, and so it is. But Judaism, Islam, and iconoclastic elements of the Protestant Reformation, all under the influence of the Second Commandment, refused representations of the divine. The Second Commandment is usually thought to be the instrument of the suppression of art—yet what ultimately flowered from this denial of divine representation was, paradoxically, the freer flowering of art itself.

The Second Commandment, alone in the ancient world in its opposition to graven images, sought to liberate religion from art, and the Creator from anthropomorphism—so that, in the second century before the Common Era, when the Greek Syrians conquered Jerusalem and invaded the First Temple and found there no statue of a god, they instantly supposed the Jews to be an atheist people. But in freeing the metaphysical from the limits of literalism, the Second Commandment also freed art to impulse, permitting it to wander limitlessly, to become purely itself, manumitted from clerical servitude. It is the Second Commandment that is the author of Picasso.

For poetry—for Word—there can be no Second Commandment. Creation and the Creator cannot be separated from Word. We will look in vain for a scriptural admonition that omits or prohibits or silences poetry. “
Va-y’hi or,
” says the God of Genesis: Let there be light: and light, and, after light, life, are spoken into existence. “In the beginning was the Word,” says the Gospel in Greek, summing up the Hebrew of Genesis. Something there is in poetry that clings and clings to what we lamely and tamely call the metaphysical—the questions that are beyond our capacity to formulate, the portraits that are beyond our capacity to trace. Poetry is not often prophecy, and surely poets are not often prophets, but it is inescapable that all true prophets are poets.

Poetry itself, because it is written, because it is spoken, because it creates a world in the mind, tends to the scriptural. “The heterocosm,” Harold Bloom calls it in an essay on Yeats, “or the poem as an alternative world to that of nature.” But poetry also aspirates the given and actual cosmos, and rounds the mundane earth—mundane yet not profane. Here is Charles Wright, fashioning a scripture of plum blossoms:

There is no Second Commandment to inhibit the imagery of the invisible in words. The visual arts cannot make scripture—they can only falsify it. God’s promise was that God’s Face would never be shown; who can copy what isn’t revealed? But poetry is an echo of revelation itself: in Adrienne Rich’s lines,

and this succinct refusal is not unlike Abraham’s hot refusal of God’s judgment of the Cities of the Plain. Milton wrote a scripture parallel with the sacral scripture of the ages; Blake did the same.

Yet no one would claim that every poet is a metaphysical poet, or that every poem is written in the breeze made by the turning-away of God’s unknowable Face, or the turning of the earth on its axis, or the spiraling of the galaxies. Nor does every poem
aspire to be a heterocosm, or intend to hold a mirror up to nature, or existence, or eternity. “I measure time by how a body sways,” says Theodore Roethke, declining eternity. And Anne Sexton looks at an earthworm cut in half and asks, ontologically, teleologically: “Have you no beginning and end?” To be saturated with eternality means to feel the ache of the ephemeral; to take precise note of the immediate means to sink into contemplation of the eternal.

A poem can be about anything at all: a mouse, a bat, a plum, a jar, a wind, a sigh, a thigh: whatever is thought or sought or caught or wrought. But
poetry
is about what is eternal, and
therefore
about the fracture in time that is a single moment. Or say it the other way around: poetry is about impingements on the senses, including the sense of innerness, and is
therefore
about what the senses, including the sense of innerness, cannot grasp in the outer oceans of Being.

Whatever any single poem may be about, poetry is about the trail, the trace, the veil of gossamer motes, that fall from the outskirts of Genesis. Poetry is the Word that can send its dipper into the formless void—
tohu va-vohu
, as Genesis has it—and draw up light.

“I, too, dislike it,” said the poet who wore a tricornered hat: she who took note of how every corner of her surround was stocked. This is a sentiment, however ironic, that a poet has a right to, since poetry is generally more skeptical than romantic. But poetry has its party of opposition, its passionate dispraisers, who go even further into negation: call them our contemporary cultural anthropologists. “Irrelevant,” they say—a term that has been abused for three decades, having been put to use chiefly for purposes of contempt. Yet irrelevant to what? To the three Screens that, like the three Fates, absorb and shape our span: movie, TV, computer? Unlike those Screens, poetry is not a universal toy of our society.

And so it is true—no one can successfully deny it—that a poem, even when it concerns the everyday, is disjunctive with the everyday, collides with it, or veers away from it. Poetry belongs to the
strange
—and in saying that, there are two meanings, or inferences, that I would instantly reject. The first is “strange” wearing its aura of “the uncanny,” a formula that comes to us from the fashionable academic theorists via Freud. And the second is “strange” in the sense of “spiritual,” a term that, in my view, resists poetry at its root. The uncanny is beyond words, beyond human expression—the work of succubi, of ghosts. The idea of the spiritual is equally ghostly, with an added faith in the penetrating power of external magicking. Neither derives from the human labor of the human imagination; both leave the work of discovery and revelation, and even the work of instinct, to mysterious forces outside human capacity. The so-called uncanny and the so-called spiritual thrive in the dilution or absence of language; both skirt intelligibility.