Howard Nemerov

loquitur the sparrow in the Zoo

in memory of the painters Paul Klee and Paul Terence Feeley I The painter’s eye follows relation out. His work is not to paint the visible, He says, it is to render visible. Being a man, and not a god, he stands Already in a world of sense, from which He borrows, to begin with, mental things Chiefly, the abstract elements of language: The point, the line, the plane, the colors and The geometric shapes. Of these he spins Relation out, he weaves its fabric up So that it speaks darkly, as music does Singing the secret history of the mind. And when in this the visible world appears, As it does do, mountain, flower, cloud, and tree, All haunted here and there with the human face, It happens as by accident, although The accident is of design. It is because Language first rises from the speechless world That the painterly intelligence Can say correctly that he makes his world, Not imitates the one before his eyes. Hence the delightsome gardens, the dark shores, The terrifying forests where nightfall Enfolds a lost and tired traveler. And hence the careless crowd deludes itself By likening his hieroglyphic signs And secret alphabets to the drawing of a child. That likeness is significant the other side Of what they see, for his simplicities Are not the first ones, but the furthest ones, Final refinements of his thought made visible. He is the painter of the human mind Finding and faithfully reflecting the mindfulness That is in things, and not the things themselves. For such a man, art is an act of faith: Prayer the study of it, as Blake says, And praise the practice; nor does he divide Making from teaching, or from theory. The three are one, and in his hours of art There shines a happiness through darkest themes, As though spirit and sense were not at odds. II The painter as an allegory of the mind At genesis. He takes a burlap bag, Tears it open and tacks it on a stretcher. He paints it black because, as he has said, Everything looks different on black. Suppose the burlap bag to be the universe, And black because its volume is the void Before the stars were. At the painter’s hand Volume becomes one-sidedly a surface, And all his depths are on the face of it. Against this flat abyss, this groundless ground Of zero thickness stretched against the cold Dark silence of the Absolutely Not, Material worlds arise, the colored earths And oil of plants that imitate the light. They imitate the light that is in thought, For the mind relates to thinking as the eye Relates to light. Only because the world Already is a language can the painter speak According to his grammar of the ground. It is archaic speech, that has not yet Divided out its cadences in words; It is a language for the oldest spells About how some thoughts rose into the mind While others, stranger still, sleep in the world. So grows the garden green, the sun vermilion. He sees the rose flame up and fade and fall And be the same rose still, the radiant in red. He paints his language, and his language is The theory of what the painter thinks. III The painter’s eye attends to death and birth Together, seeing a single energy Momently manifest in every form, As in the tree the growing of the tree Exploding from the seed not more nor less Than from the void condensing down and in, Summoning sun and rain. He views the tree, The great tree standing in the garden, say, As thrusting downward its vast spread and weight, Growing its green height from the dark watered earth, And as suspended weightless in the sky, Haled forth and held up by the hair of its head. He follows through the flowing of the forms From the divisions of the trunk out to The veinings of the leaf, and the leaf’s fall. His pencil meditates the many in the one After the method in the confluence of rivers, The running of ravines on mountainsides, And in the deltas of the nerves; he sees How things must be continuous with themselves As with whole worlds that they themselves are not, In order that they may be so transformed. He stands where the eternity of thought Opens upon perspective time and space; He watches mind become incarnate; then He paints the tree. IV These thoughts have chiefly been about the painter Klee, About how he in our hard time might stand to us Especially whose lives concern themselves with learning As patron of the practical intelligence of art, And thence as model, modest and humorous in sufferings, For all research that follows spirit where it goes. That there should be much goodness in the world, Much kindness and intelligence, candor and charm, And that it all goes down in the dust after a while, This is a subject for the steadiest meditations Of the heart and mind, as for the tears That clarify the eye toward charity. So may it be to all of us, that at some times In this bad time when faith in study seems to fail, And when impatience in the street and still despair at home Divide the mind to rule it, there shall be some comfort come From the remembrance of so deep and clear a life as his Whom I have thought of, for the wholeness of his mind, As the painter dreaming in the scholar’s house, His dream an emblem to us of the life of thought, The same dream that then flared before intelligence When light first went forth looking for the eye.

It is true, that even in the best-run state Such things will happen; it is true, What’s done is done. The law, whereby we hate Our hatred, sees no fire in the flue But by the smoke, and not for thought alone It punishes, but for the thing that’s done. And yet there is the horror of the fact, Though we knew not the man. To die in jail, To be beaten to death, to know the act Of personal fury before the eyes can fail And the man die against the cold last wall Of the lonely world—and neither is that all: There is the terror too of each man’s thought, That knows not, but must quietly suspect His neighbor, friend, or self of being taught To take an attitude merely correct; Being frightened of his own cold image in The glass of government, and his own sin, Frightened lest senate house and prison wall Be quarried of one stone, lest righteous and high Look faintly smiling down and seem to call A crime the welcome chance of liberty, And any man an outlaw who aggrieves The patriotism of a pair of thieves.

an introductory lecture This morning we shall spend a few minutes Upon the study of symbolism, which is basic To the nature of money. I show you this nickel. Icons and cryptograms are written all over The nickel: one side shows a hunchbacked bison Bending his head and curling his tail to accommodate The circular nature of money. Over him arches UNITED STATES OF AMERICA , and, squinched in Between that and his rump, E PLURIBUS UNUM , A Roman reminiscence that appears to mean An indeterminately large number of things All of which are the same. Under the bison A straight line giving him a ground to stand on Reads FIVE CENTS . And on the other side of our nickel There is the profile of a man with long hair And a couple of feathers in the hair; we know Somehow that he is an American Indian, and He wears the number nineteen-thirty-six. Right in front of his eyes the word LIBERTY , bent To conform with the curve of the rim, appears To be falling out of the sky Y first; the Indian Keeps his eyes downcast and does not notice this; To notice it, indeed, would be shortsighted of him. So much for the iconography of one of our nickels, Which is now becoming a rarity and something of A collectors’ item: for as a matter of fact There is almost nothing you can buy with a nickel, The representative American Indian was destroyed A hundred years or so ago, and his descendants’ Relations with liberty are maintained with reservations, Or primitive concentration camps; while the bison, Except for a few examples kept in cages, Is now extinct. Something like that, I think, Is what Keats must have meant in his celebrated Ode on a Grecian Urn. Notice, in conclusion, A number of circumstances sometimes overlooked Even by experts: (a) Indian and bison, Confined to obverse and reverse of the coin, Can never see each other; (b) they are looking In opposite directions, the bison past The Indian’s feathers, the Indian past The bison’s tail; (c) they are upside down To one another; (d) the bison has a human face Somewhat resembling that of Jupiter Ammon. I hope that our studies today will have shown you Something of the import of symbolism With respect to the understanding of what is symbolized.

Earth’s Wrath at our assaults is slow to come But relentless when it does. It has to do With catastrophic change, and with the limit At which one order more of Magnitude Will bring us to a qualitative change And disasters drastically different From those we daily have to know about. As with the speed of light, where speed itself Becomes a limit and an absolute; As with the splitting of the atom And a little later of the nucleus; As with the millions rising into billions— The piker’s kind in terms of money, yes, But a million 2 in terms of time and space As the universe grew vast while the earth Our habitat diminished to the size Of a billiard ball, both relative To the cosmos and to the numbers of ourselves, The doubling numbers, the earth could accommodate. We stand now in the place and limit of time Where hardest knowledge is turning into dream, And nightmares still contained in sleeping dark Seem on the point of bringing into day The sweating panic that starts the sleeper up. One or another nightmare may come true, And what to do then? What in the world to do?

Roughly figured, this man of moderate habits, This average consumer of the middle class, Consumed in the course of his average life span Just under half a million cigarettes, Four thousand fifths of gin and about A quarter as much vermouth; he drank Maybe a hundred thousand cups of coffee, And counting his parents’ share it cost Something like half a million dollars To put him through life. How many beasts Died to provide him with meat, belt and shoes Cannot be certainly said. But anyhow, It is in this way that a man travels through time, Leaving behind him a lengthening trail Of empty bottles and bones, of broken shoes, Frayed collars and worn out or outgrown Diapers and dinnerjackets, silk ties and slickers. Given the energy and security thus achieved, He did . . . ? What? The usual things, of course, The eating, dreaming, drinking and begetting, And he worked for the money which was to pay For the eating, et cetera, which were necessary If he were to go on working for the money, et cetera, But chiefly he talked. As the bottles and bones Accumulated behind him, the words proceeded Steadily from the front of his face as he Advanced into the silence and made it verbal. Who can tally the tale of his words? A lifetime Would barely suffice for their repetition; If you merely printed all his commas the result Would be a very large volume, and the number of times He said “thank you” or “very little sugar, please,” Would stagger the imagination. There were also Witticisms, platitudes, and statements beginning “It seems to me” or “As I always say.” Consider the courage in all that, and behold the man Walking into deep silence, with the ectoplastic Cartoon’s balloon of speech proceeding Steadily out of the front of his face, the words Borne along on the breath which is his spirit Telling the numberless tale of his untold Word Which makes the world his apple, and forces him to eat.

Before you can learn the trees, you have to learn The language of the trees. That’s done indoors, Out of a book, which now you think of it Is one of the transformations of a tree. The words themselves are a delight to learn, You might be in a foreign land of terms Like samara, capsule, drupe, legume and pome, Where bark is papery, plated, warty or smooth. But best of all are the words that shape the leaves— Orbicular, cordate, cleft and reniform— And their venation—palmate and parallel— And tips—acute, truncate, auriculate. Sufficiently provided, you may now Go forth to the forests and the shady streets To see how the chaos of experience Answers to catalogue and category. Confusedly. The leaves of a single tree May differ among themselves more than they do From other species, so you have to find, All blandly says the book, “an average leaf.” Example, the catalpa in the book Sprays out its leaves in whorls of three Around the stem; the one in front of you But rarely does, or somewhat, or almost; Maybe it’s not catalpa? Dreadful doubt. It may be weeks before you see an elm Fanlike in form, a spruce that pyramids, A sweetgum spiring up in steeple shape. Still,pedetemtim as Lucretius says, Little by little, you do start to learn; And learn as well, maybe, what language does And how it does it, cutting across the world Not always at the joints, competing with Experience while cooperating with Experience, and keeping an obstinate Intransigence, uncanny, of its own. Think finally about the secret will Pretending obedience to Nature, but Invidiously distinguishing everywhere, Dividing up the world to conquer it, And think also how funny knowledge is: You may succeed in learning many trees And calling off their names as you go by, But their comprehensive silence stays the same.

see Amos , 3:15 A door sunk in a hillside, with a bolt thick as the boy’s arm, and behind that door the walls of ice, melting a blue, faint light, an air of cedar branches, sawdust, fern: decaying seasons keeping from decay. A summer guest, the boy had never seen (a servant told him of it) how the lake froze three foot thick, how farmers came with teams, with axe and saw, to cut great blocks of ice, translucid, marbled, glittering in the sun, load them on sleds and drag them up the hill to be manhandled down the narrow path and set in courses for the summer’s keeping, the kitchen uses and luxuriousness of the great houses. And he heard how once a team and driver drowned in the break of spring: the man’s cry melting from the ice that summer frightened the sherbet-eaters off the terrace. Dust of the cedar, lost and evergreen among the slowly blunting water walls where the blade edge melted and the steel saw’s bite was rounded out, and the horse and rider drowned in the red sea’s blood, I was the silly child who dreamed that riderless cry, and saw the guests run from a ghostly wall, so long before the winter house fell with the summer house, and the houses, Egypt, the great houses, had an end.

I tell you that I see her still At the dark entrance of the hall. One gas lamp burning near her shoulder Shone also from her other side Where hung the long inaccurate glass Whose pictures were as troubled water. An immense shadow had its hand Between us on the floor, and seemed To hump the knuckles nervously, A giant crab readying to walk, Or a blanket moving in its sleep. You will remember, with a smile Instructed by movies to reminisce, How strict her corsets must have been, How the huge arrangements of her hair Would certainly betray the least Impassionate displacement there. It was no rig for dallying, And maybe only marriage could Derange that queenly scaffolding— As when a great ship, coming home, Coasts in the harbor, dropping sail And loosing all the tackle that had laced Her in the long lanes .... I know We need not draw this figure out. But all that whalebone came from whales. And all the whales lived in the sea, In calm beneath the troubled glass, Until the needle drew their blood. I see her standing in the hall, Where the mirror’s lashed to blood and foam, And the black flukes of agony Beat at the air till the light blows out.

This admirable gadget, when it is Wound on a string and spun with steady force, Maintains its balance on most any smooth Surface, pleasantly humming as it goes. It is whirled not on a constant course, but still Stands in unshivering integrity For quite some time, meaning nothing perhaps But being something agreeable to watch, A silver nearly silence gleaning a still- ness out of speed, composing unity From spin, so that its hollow spaces seem Solids of light, until it wobbles and Begins to whine, and then with an odd lunge Eccentric and reckless, it skids away And drops dead into its own skeleton.