Possessed by Memory
Page 46
—You remember, that’s the reader—
And you pull him through his navel inside out.
That’s to get his beasts outside him,
For they’ve got to come aboard him,
As the best directions have it, two by two.
When you’ve taken all their tickets
And you’ve marched them through his sockets,
Let the tempest bust Creation: heed not you.
For you’re riding high and mighty
In a gale that’s pushing ninety
With a solid bottom under you—that’s his.
Fellow flesh affords a rampart,
And you’ve got along for comfort
All the world there ever shall be, was, and is.
The verve and rapidity of this is a total delight. Macpherson’s metric has the buoyancy of Gilbert and Sullivan and of the nonsense verse of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. We are to become her Ark. The wonderful play on “pupil” returns us to a parable of Jesus.
Macpherson will save us from the Flood by pulling each of us inside out through the navel. Our beasts will then be able to come aboard us, and the jaunty pararhyme of “tickets” and “sockets” augments the rush and splendor. Our beasts externalized come aboard us, and we and they are safe from the tempest. The reader’s solid bottom becomes a rampart. All of existence—past, present, future—depends upon ourselves, as readers, taking on the role of Noah.
Eight tiny lyrics are then uttered by the Ark. The best of them is the last, “Ark Parting”:
You dreamed it. From my ground
You raised that flood, these fears.
The creatures all but drowned
Fled your well of tears.
Outward the fresh shores gleam
Clear in new-washed eyes.
Fare well. From your dream
I only shall not rise.
The plangency of this is exquisite. I hear in it a voice unlike any other, and one that will survive.
Amy Clampitt, “A Hermit Thrush”
I KNEW AMY CLAMPITT ONLY SLIGHTLY, though her life’s companion, the legal scholar Harold Korn, had been my close undergraduate friend at Cornell University. In 1983, when The Kingfisher appeared, I instantly admired her poetry, in part because she was a master of what Paul Fussell had named as the American Shore Ode. “Beach Glass” took its place for me with the procession from Walt Whitman’s “Sea-Drift” elegies through Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and Hart Crane on to Elizabeth Bishop, May Swenson, A. R. Ammons, and James Wright. I have written about “Beach Glass” in my book The Anatomy of Influence and will not revisit it here. Amy Clampitt’s strongest books were Westward (1990) and the finality of A Silence Opens (1994). Her most moving poem remains “A Hermit Thrush” from the volume Archaic Figure (1987):
Nothing’s certain. Crossing, on this longest day,
the low-tide-uncovered isthmus, scrambling up
the scree-slope of what at high tide
will be again an island,
to where, a decade since well-being staked
the slender, unpremeditated claim that brings us
back, year after year, lugging the
makings of another picnic—
the cucumber sandwiches, the sea-air-sanctified
fig newtons—there’s no knowing what the slamming
seas, the gales of yet another winter
may have done. Still there,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
but, like our own prolonged attachment, holding.
Whatever moral lesson might commend itself,
there’s no use drawing one,
there’s nothing here
to seize on as exemplifying any so-called virtue
(holding on despite adversity, perhaps) or
any no-more-than-human tendency—
stubborn adherence, say,
to a wholly wrongheaded tenet. Though to
hold on in any case means taking less and less
for granted, some few things seem nearly
certain, as that the longest day
will come again, will seem to hold its breath,
the months-long exhalation of diminishment
again begin. Last night you woke me
for a look at Jupiter,
that vast cinder wheeled unblinking
in a bath of galaxies. Watching, we traveled
toward an apprehension all but impossible
to be held onto—
that no point is fixed, that there’s no foothold
but roams untethered save by such snells,
such sailor’s knots, such stays
and guy wires as are
mainly of our own devising. From such an
empyrean, aloof seraphic mentors urge us
to look down on all attachment,
on any bonding, as
in the end untenable. Base as it is, from
year to year the earth’s sore surface
mends and rebinds itself, however
and as best it can, with
. . . . . . . . .
and what can’t finally be mended, the salt air
proceeds to buff and rarefy: the lopped carnage
of the seaward spruce clump weathers
lustrous, to wood-silver.
Little is certain, other than the tide that
circumscribes us that still sets its term
to every picnic—today we stayed too long
again, and got our feet wet—
and all attachment may prove at best, perhaps,
a broken, a much-mended thing. Watching
the longest day take cover under
a monk’s-cowl overcast,
with thunder, rain and wind, then waiting,
we drop everything to listen as a
hermit thrush distills its fragmentary,
hesitant, in the end
unbroken music. From what source (beyond us, or
the wells within?) such links perceived arrive—
diminished sequences so uninsistingly
not even human—there’s
hardly a vocabulary left to wonder, uncertain
as we are of so much in this existence, this
botched, cumbersome, much-mended,
not unsatisfactory thing.
Amy Clampitt is well aware of the hermit thrush in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and in The Waste Land. She glides past these formidable precursors by stationing the unbroken music of her thrush at the close of this infinitely gentle testament to an attachment never to end. Fragmentary and hesitant, the thrush’s song contrasts with the holding-on, rebinding, breaking, much-mending, mutual existence of Harold Korn and Amy Clampitt.
A student remarked to me that seventy-six lines might seem excessive for hymning even a lifelong attachment. I do not remember replying, but since I was already well past eighty, I probably reflected that in sixty years my student might no longer agree with herself. Even had Hal Korn not been a close friend of my youth, I still believe “A Hermit Thrush” would retain its poignance for me.
I turn to “Voyages,” the eighth lyric in the sequence of that title, which is an homage to John Keats:
On April twenty-seventh, 1932, Hart Crane
walked to the taffrail of the Orizaba,
took off his coat, and leaped. At seventeen,
a changeling from among the tire-and-rubber
factories, steel mills, cornfields of the Ohio
flatland that had absent-mindedly produced him,
on an enthralled first voyage he’d looked into
the troughed Caribbean, and called it home.
Back where he’d never been at home, he’d once
watched the early-morning shift pour down South Main—
immigrant Greeks eager to be Americans—
and then tried to imagine Porphyro in Akron
(Greek for “high place”); the casement, the arras,
the fabricated love nest, the actual sleet storm,
the owl, the limping hare, the frozen grass,
Keats’s own recurring dream of being warm—
who’d been so often cold he looked with yearning even
into blacksmiths’ fires: “How glorious,” he wrote
of them, shivering (with Stevens) to see the stars put on
their glittering belts: of what disaster was that
chill, was that salt wind the imminence? The cold—
a-long-time, lifetime snow man did not know.
Beside the Neva, Osip Mandelstam wrote of the cold,
the December fog-blurs of Leningrad. O to throw
open (he wrote) a window on the Adriatic!—a window
for the deprived of audience, for the unfree
to breathe, to breathe even the bad air of Moscow.
Yet on the freezing pane of perpetuity,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The dream of being warm, tattered cargo
brought too late to Italy, a mere dire fistful
of blood (the sea had soaked his heart through):
the voyage, every voyage at the end is cruel.
In February 1937, from exile to flatland
Voronezh, a kind of twin of Akron, Mandelstam
wrote, in an almost posthumous whisper, of round
blue bays, of sails descried—scenes parted from
as now his voyage to the bottom of a crueler
obscurity began, whose end only the false-haired
seaweed of an inland shipwreck would register.
Untaken voyages, Lethean cold, O all but unendured
arrivals! Keats’s starved stare before the actual,
so long imagined Bay of Naples. The mind’s extinction.
Nightlong, sleepless beside the Spanish Steps, the prattle
of poured water. Letters no one will ever open.
It astonishes me that Amy Clampitt intricately weaves together Hart Crane, John Keats, Wallace Stevens, and Osip Mandelstam in a dozen quatrains. Keats’s dream of being warm becomes Mandelstam’s and links to Hart Crane’s sense at seventeen of coming home to the Mediterranean, and to Wallace Stevens’s vision of the auroras transmuted into stellar splendor. “The sea had soaked his heart through,” George Chapman’s powerful rendering from Odyssey V of the death of a shipmate of Ulysses, kindled Keats to his own incarnation of the poetical character.
Amy Clampitt found her warmth in poetry and in life. “Voyages,” both the sequence and the concluding lyric, charts her own odyssey back to her forerunners. She entitled her book of essays Predecessors, Et Cetera. A deep reader and admirer of her work, I am nevertheless aware, as she was, that Keats, Hart Crane, Stevens, Mandelstam constituted a galaxy she could not join. Her persistence and permanence are of another order. She loved Gerard Manley Hopkins, himself a superb amalgam of Keats and Walt Whitman, and did not presume to share his eminence. Yet I go on returning to her poems.
[ Coda ]
IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME
Though I have been reading Proust since I was nineteen and have written about him thrice before, I turn to him now because I have just understood, six years after I began Possessed by Memory, that he is more central to my project than anyone else, except for Shakespeare and Dr. Samuel Johnson. What matters most in Proust are the privileged moments, sudden ecstasies of revelation. You can count these many different ways, but they seem to me innumerable.
The great original for most of our theories of time and memory remains Saint Augustine. For Augustine, cognition and love both depend upon the workings of memory. You can see Augustine as the greatest of Christian Platonists, but largely because he identified Christ as the Wisdom of God. Peter Brown, in his great biography Augustine of Hippo (1967), demonstrates that the Christ of Augustine’s boyhood was very different from our expectations. There were no crucifixes in the fourth century. Christ was the Wisdom of God.
Brian Stock, in his Augustine the Reader (1996), argues persuasively that Augustine invented reading, precisely in his conviction that only God was the true reader. That meant that reading well was to imitate God and the angels.
For Augustine, reading was the road for conversion to Christ. That made him skeptical of the reader’s ability to interpret correctly. And yet, by inventing autobiographical memory, Augustine was the first to say that only the book could nourish memory and thought.
Wisdom and faith are very different from wisdom and literature. If they are brought together in Augustine, it is in one great outcry, in section 154 of Erich Przywara’s An Augustine Synthesis (1958):
These days have no true being; they are gone almost before they arrive; and when they come they cannot continue; they press upon one another, they follow the one the other, and cannot check themselves in their course. Of the past nothing is called back again; what is yet to be expected is something which will pass away again; it is not yet possessed, whilst as yet it is not arrived; it cannot be kept when once it is arrived. The Psalmist therefore asks, ‘what is the number of my days’ (Ps. xxxviii, 5), what is, not what is not; and (for this confounds me by a still greater and more perplexing difficulty) both is and is not. For we can neither say that that is, which does not continue, nor that it is not when it is come and is passing. It is that absolute IS, that true IS, that IS in the strict sense of the word, that I long for, that IS which is in the Jerusalem which is the bride of my Lord, where…the day shall not pass away but shall endure, a day which no yesterday precedes nor a morrow ousts. This number of my days, which is, I say, make Thou known to me.
When Proust meditates in this mode, he puts his faith in art. Augustine, a lifelong reader and lover of Virgil, nevertheless chooses Jerusalem, the bride of God. In his Confessions, composed in Latin from 397 to 400 C.E., he inaugurated the Western tradition of the autobiographical inner life. The book is addressed directly to God. Its material is memory. Augustine distinguishes between his two wills, old carnal and new spiritual.
Augustine pioneers the search for lost time. He seeks for the fact in memory yet is highly aware that the remembering self always disrupts the past. Augustine has a vision of the labyrinth of memory. He speaks of it as a place that is no place. We are given a very difficult distinction among three times: things past that are yet present, things present, future things already present. What is most crucial for literary tradition is what Augustine calls returning moments of spiritual enlightenment, which arrive, as he says, “in a thrust of a trembling glance.” We confront here the birth of a major trope, variously termed an epiphany, or a good or privileged moment.
At one time, Augustine and his mother, Monica, spoke to each other about God’s eternal Light. In a rapid cognitive illumination, they suddenly were dazzled by the flash of the eternal Wisdom. It departed. And yet it performed a work not only for them but for a myriad of writers, secular and sacred, on to almost our era.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), in his unfinished work Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1776–78), perhaps inaugurated the secular epiphany. He was followed by a cascade of German Romantic poets and philosophers, including Schelling, Goethe, and, most powerfully, Hölderlin. What Augustine had called momentum (the moment) was termed by Hölderlin and the others der Augenblick, a moment of freedom in which the soul returned to ecstasy.
William Blake wrote of what he
called the “Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find” that “renovates every Moment of the Day if rightly placed”; or the epiphany “Within a Moment: a Pulsation of the Artery when the Poet’s Work is Done” (Milton 35.42–45, 29.1–3).
William Wordsworth, who inaugurated modern poetry, is also the pivotal figure in the secularization of the epiphany. He did this by his myth of memory, which turned upon what he called “spots of time.” These are flashes of radiance against a darkened background. They give evidences of the power of the poet’s mind over a universe of death. For certain moments, they imply that the mind is lord and master, outward sense the servant of its will.
My friend and former student, the late Thomas Weiskel, emphasized the surprising proximity of the “spots of time” to images and memories of death and dying. There is a kind of visionary dreariness in these benign manifestations. Visionary power rises out of the darkness of human mortality. The Romantic Sublime, secular even when the poet professed Christianity, cannot rely upon the Incarnation and the Resurrection.
A humanistic privileged moment has no sanction except its own eloquence and reverberation. Wordsworth had an extraordinary gift for memorable phrasing, the most powerful in the language since Shakespeare and Milton. Though he owed much to both of them, he consciously endeavored to use words that he regarded as being brought down to the earth and that would speak of us as we are. This was something of a self-deluded idealism, since Wordsworth remained more Miltonic than Shakespearean. Many great poets have insisted that they would use a fresh language, available to all women and men. More often than not, this is a noble fantasy. Walt Whitman, strongest of American poets, asserted that he wished to be read by common, uneducated persons. And yet he remains an elitist poet, subtle, evasive, and difficult.
Shakespeare is always the exception, but, then, he remains an inexplicable miracle. The Good Moment was then transformed by John Ruskin and Robert Browning, who then bequeathed it to Walter Pater, whose Privileged Moments deeply affected all of what we used to call Modernism. Among Pater’s progeny were Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and, despite himself, T. S. Eliot. In the United States, there is a strong element of Pater in Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane.