Into the Looking-Glass Wood

by Alberto Manguel

  as light enters water and alters it not,

  yet sets quick fire beneath the surface,

  as rapture may enter a body held in thought;

  even as water remains the reflecting semblance

  that turns burning, that casts back shattered fire

  manyfold into the blinded beholder’s eye,

  to enter water discovered is Hiram’s desire;

  even as cold motionless depths unsounded

  by light or the lost rumour of light remain

  haven of absent creatures, beings we deem

  monstrous for light stricken from their domain;

  yet into this radiant world Hiram and Jenny

  slip together, bright in each other’s sight,

  as a vessel, surging, divides the featureless waters

  that cleft, curled, breaking, may enter light.

  “Error” recognizes the paradoxical quality of everyday experience, how the simplest things—water, light—mirror endless streams of meaning, which we who take part in the experience, who merely read it, transform by our presence. By the elemental act of bathing, with all its sexual reverberations, Outram’s man and woman become the God of Creation who changed, the Book of Genesis tells us, “the darkness upon the face of the deep.”

  Our divine quality does not, however, make us any wiser, as Outram’s next book, Mogul Recollected, suggests. Outram’s long elegy for Mogul, an elephant drowned during a New Brunswick ferry crossing in 1836, ends like this:

  Being not man nor angel but beast, Mogul

  saw not through his eye but with it life

  in the myriad present: which is immortal.

  And he beheld, as he was beholden to,

  what he became: his one death.

  After Mogul, Outram began a series of visionary poems. His sybil is Ms. Cassie, sister of Yeats’s Crazy Jane, what, in another context, Outram calls one of the “Prophets of mundane doom.” Ms. Cassie speaks with Death and with the sun, reads palms and the Bible, suffers second sight. True seer, she sees the paradox of the obvious: “a cross/ nailed to a man,” “Eve, released by design/ from his rib-/ cage,” that “Given its blind due the dead/ moon will rise.…” These paradoxes are our daily reality.

  “Things thought too long can be no longer thought,” wrote Yeats in 1936, in one of his last poems. Ms. Cassie echoes this adamantine law (in “Ms. Cassie Writes an Open Letter”):

  Death at first

  it is borne in upon us

  it is immortal delight it is past

  our understanding it was ever thus.

  Now for the last time may we be made aware.

  That nothing and nothing went wrong.

  It is never a question of belief.

  It is the harrowed lifelong

  brevity of grief.

  Long thought has wasted fear of death to the bone, down to a “lifelong brevity of grief,” but between the lines of Ms. Cassie’s letter lurks a multiplicity of ancient notions. A stoic truism: “Death: at first it is borne in upon us. It is immortal delight. It is past our understanding. It was ever thus.” An Augustinian hope: “Death at first. It is borne. In, upon, us, it is immortal delight. It is past. Our understanding: it was ever thus.” A Lutheran conviction: “Death: at first it is borne in upon us. It is immortal. Delight: it is past our understanding. It was ever thus.” All these readings are possible, none is definitive, every one is implied. In Ms. Cassie’s poems Outram has achieved what Yeats expected from a “truthful poem”: “I had in my memory,” wrote Yeats in a note appended in 1933 to The Winding Stair, “Byzantine mosaic pictures of the Annunciation, which show a line drawn from a star to the ear of the Virgin. She received the Word through the ear, a star fell, and a star was born.” These simultaneous revelations co-exist in Outram’s poems.

  Each new writer who, in the eyes of even one reader, becomes essential to understanding the world, changes history, provides a new order, demands a new reading of the past. Outram restores to our poetry a brash intimacy with metaphysics that has become somehow unacceptable in our time. Outram’s predecessors are among the seventeenth-century English poets, George Herbert in particular, John Donne of course, and two major American poets, Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens. Reading Outram suggests that these previously unrelated writers have, in fact, common bonds, which Outram has brought to light: a happy kinship with the holy.

  “Poets in our civilization,” said Eliot, “must be difficult.” Our tired times, however, have led us to avoid the difficult or, worse, to regard it as ostentatious and pedantic. We are asked to accept this paradox: that what is profound is superfluous. This has become our excuse for being lazy. Of course, at all times readers have had silly rules dictating their fashion in literature. The canonical book of Victorian poetry, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, excluded Donne and most of the metaphysical poets who weren’t considered “accomplished”; it wasn’t until Oscar Williams revised the Treasury in 1953 that redress was made.

  Readers mature later than writers and require certain mysterious preparations to receive them properly. Fortunately, good writing is persistent. It will not go away. It is there to translate much of our dealing with the world and with ourselves, to give voice to our questions. It isn’t easy, in the sense that language itself isn’t easy, but it is clear and resonant. We, of course, have no obligation to listen to its echo. As usual, we have the choice of remaining deaf.

  XI

  GETTING RID OF THE ARTISTS

  “And what does it live on?”

  “Weak tea with cream in it.”

  A new difficulty came into Alice’s head. “Supposing

  it couldn’t find any?” she suggested.

  “Then it would die, of course.”

  “But that must happen very often,” Alice remarked

  thoughtfully.

  “It always happens” said the Gnat.

  Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter III

  Jonah and the Whale

  A Sermon

  in memory of Paul Fleck

  “Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!”

  HERMAN MELVILLE,

  Moby-Dick, Chapter XXXXII

  OF ALL THE SNARLING or moaning prophets who haunt the pages of the Old Testament, I believe that none is so curious as the prophet known as Jonah. I like Jonah. I have a fondness for Jonah, in spite of his posthumous reputation as a purveyor of bad luck. I think I’ve discovered what it was about Jonah that made people nervous in his presence. I think Jonah had what in the nineteenth century was called an artistic temperament. I think Jonah was an artist.

  The first time I heard the story of Jonah, it was from a great-uncle of mine, who had the disagreeable habit of spitting into his handkerchief when he talked. He had a small claim to Jewish scholarship, which we believed did not go far beyond the few verses he taught us to memorize for our bar mitzvah. But sometimes he could tell a good story, and if you didn’t look too closely at the spittle forming at the corners of his mouth, the experience could be quite entertaining. The story of Jonah came about one day when I was being especially pigheaded, refusing to do something or other I had been asked to do for the one-hundredth time. “Just like Jonah,” said my great-uncle, holding his handkerchief to his mouth, spitting heartily and tucking the handkerchief deep into his pocket. “Always no, no, no. What will you grow up to be? An anarchist?” For my great-uncle, who in spite of the pogroms had always felt an curious admiration for the tsar, there was nothing worse than an anarchist, except perhaps a journalist. He said that journalists were all peeping Toms and Nosy Parkers, and that if you wanted to find out what was going on in the world you could do so from your friends in the café. Which he did, day in, day out, except, of course, on the Shabbath.

  The story of Jonah was probably written sometime in the fourth or fifth century B.C. The Book of Jonah is one of the shortest in the Bible—and one of the strangest. It tells how the prophet Jonah was summoned by God to go and cry against the city of Nineveh, whose wic
kedness had reached the ears of Heaven. But Jonah refused, because he knew that through his word the Ninevites would repent and God would forgive them. To escape the divine order, Jonah jumped on a ship sailing for Tarshish. A furious storm rose, the sailors moaned in despair and Jonah, somehow understanding that he was the cause of this meteorological turmoil, asked to be thrown into the sea to calm the waves. The sailors obliged, the storm died down, and Jonah was swallowed by a great fish, appointed for this purpose by God Himself. There in the bowels of the fish Jonah remained for three long days and three long nights. On the fourth day, the Lord caused the great fish to vomit the prophet out onto dry land and, once again, the Lord ordered Jonah to go to Nineveh and speak to the people. This time Jonah obeyed. The King of Nineveh heard the warning, immediately repented, and the city of Nineveh was saved. But Jonah was furious with the Lord and stormed out into the desert to the east of the city, where he set up a sort of booth and sat and waited to see what would become of the repentant Nineveh. The Lord then caused a plant to sprout up and protect Jonah from the sun. Jonah expressed his gratitude for the divine gift, but next morning, the Lord caused the plant to wither. The sun and the wind beat hard on Jonah, and faint with heat he told the Lord it was better for him to die. Then the Lord spoke to Jonah and said: “You are upset because I killed a simple plant and yet you wished me to destroy all the people of Nineveh. Should I have spared a plant but not spared these people ‘who do not know their right hand from their left,’ and also much cattle?” With this unanswered question, the Book of Jonah ends.

  I am fascinated by the reason for Jonah’s refusal to prophesy in Nineveh. The idea that Jonah would keep away from performing his divinely inspired piece because he knew his audience would repent and be therefore forgiven, must seem incomprehensible to anyone except an artist. Jonah knew that Ninevite society dealt in one of two ways with its artists: either it saw the accusation in an artist’s work and blamed the artist for the evils of which the society stood accused, or it assimilated the artist’s work because, valued in dinars and nicely framed, the art could serve as a pleasant decoration. In such circumstances, Jonah knew, no artist can win.

  Given the choice between creating an accusation or a decoration, Jonah would have probably preferred the accusation. Like most artists, what Jonah really wanted was to stir the languid hearts of his listeners, to touch them, to awaken in them something vaguely known and yet utterly mysterious, to trouble their dreams and to haunt their waking hours. What he certainly did not want, under any circumstances, was their repentance. Having the listeners simply say to themselves, “All’s forgiven and forgotten, let’s bury the past, let’s not talk about injustice and the need for retribution, cuts in education and health programs, unequal taxation and unemployment; let exploiters shake hands with exploited, and on to our next glorious money-making hour”—no, that was something Jonah certainly did not want. Nadine Gordimer, of whom Jonah had never heard, said that there could be no worse fate for a writer than not being execrated in a corrupt society. Jonah did not wish to suffer that annihilating fate.

  Above all, Jonah was aware of Nineveh’s ongoing war between the politicians and the artists, a war in which Jonah felt that all the artists’ efforts (beyond the efforts demanded by their craft) were ultimately futile because they took place in the political arena. It was a well-known fact that Ninevite artists (who had never tired in the pursuit of their own art) grew quickly weary of the struggle with bureaucrats and banks, and the few heroes who had continued the fight against the corrupt secretaries of state and royal lackeys had done so many times at the expense of both their art and their sanity. It was very difficult to go to your studio or to your clay tablets after a day of committee meetings. The bureaucrats of Nineveh counted on this, of course, and one of their most effective tactics was delay: delaying agreements, delaying the attribution of funds, delaying contracts, delaying appointments, delaying outright answers. If you waited long enough, they said, the rage of the artist would fade, or rather mysteriously turn into creative energy: the artist would go away and write a poem or do an installation or dream up a dance. And these things represented little danger to banks and private corporations. In fact, as business people well knew, many times this artistic rage became marketable merchandise. “Think,” the Ninevites often said, “how much you’d pay today for the work of painters who in their time hardly had enough money to buy paint, let alone food. For an artist,” they added knowingly, “posthumous fame is its own reward.”

  But the great triumph of Ninevite politicians was their success in getting the artists to work against themselves. So imbued was Nineveh with the idea that wealth was the city’s goal, and that art, since it was not an immediate producer of wealth, was an undeserving pursuit, that the artists themselves came to believe that they should pay their own way in the world, producing cost-efficient art, frowning on failure and lack of recognition, and above all, trying to gratify those who, being wealthy, were also in positions of power. So visual artists were asked to make their work more pleasing, composers to write music with a hummable tune, writers to imagine not-so-depressing scenarios, since, in the words of Dorothy Parker (who as far as I know was not from Nineveh):

  Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song

  A medley of extemporanea,

  And love is a thing that can never go wrong

  And I am Marie of Roumania.

  In times long gone by, in short periods during which the bureaucrats slumbered, certain funds had been granted to artistic causes by soft-hearted or soft-headed Ninevite kings. Since those times, more conscientious officials had been redressing this financial oversight and vigorously pruning down the allotted sums. No official would, of course, recognize any such change in the government’s support of the arts, and yet the Ninevite secretary of finance was able to cut the actual funds allotted to the arts down to almost nothing, while at the same time advertising a committed increase of those same funds in the official records. This was done by the use of certain devices borrowed from the Ninevite poets (whose tools the politicians happily pilfered, while despising the poets who invented them). Metonymy, for instance, the device by which a poet uses a part or an attribute of something to stand in its place (“crown” for “king” for example), allowed the secretary of provisions to cut down on the funds spent on subsidizing artists’ work materials. All any artist now received from the City, whatever his needs, was a number-four rat-hair paintbrush, since in the secretary’s official vocabulary “brush” was made to stand for “the ensemble of an artist’s equipment.” Metaphors, the most common of poetic tools, were employed to great effect by these financial wizards. In one celebrated case, a sum of ten thousand gold dinars had been set aside long ago for the lodging of senior artists. By simply redefining camels, used in public transport, as “temporary lodgings,” the secretary of finance was able to count the cost of the camels’ upkeep (for which the City of Nineveh was responsible) as part of the sum allotted to artists’ lodgings, since the senior artists did indeed use subsidized public camels to get from place to place.

  “The real artists,” said the Ninevites, “have no cause to complain. If they are really good at what they do, they will make a buck no matter what the social conditions. It’s the others, the so-called experimenters, the self-indulgers, the prophets, who don’t make a cent and whine about their condition. A banker who doesn’t know how to turn a profit would be equally lost. A bureaucrat who didn’t recognize the need to clog things down would be out of a job. This is the law of survival. Nineveh is a society that looks to the future.”

  True: in Nineveh, a handful of artists (and many con artists) made a good living. Ninevite society liked to reward a few of the makers of the products it consumed. What it would not recognize, of course, was the vast majority of the artists whose attempts and glitterings and failures allowed the successes of others to be born. Ninevite society didn’t have to support anything it didn’t instantly like or understand. The truth was th
at this vast majority of artists would carry on, of course, no matter what, simply because they couldn’t help it, the Lord or the Holy Spirit urging them on night after night. They carried on writing and painting and composing and dancing by whatever means they could find. “Like every other worker in society,” the Ninevites said.

  It is told that the first time Jonah heard this particular point of Ninevite wisdom, he drummed up his prophetic courage and stood in the public square of Nineveh to address the crowds. “The artist,” Jonah attempted to explain, “is not like every other worker in society. The artist deals with reality: inner and outer reality transformed into meaningful symbols. Those who deal in money deal in symbols behind which stands nothing. It is wonderful to think of the thousands and thousands of Ninevite stockbrokers for whom reality, the real world, is the arbitrary rising and falling of figures transformed in their imagination into wealth—a wealth that exists only on a piece of paper or on a flickering screen. No fantasy writer, no virtual reality artist could ever aspire to create in an audience such an all-pervading suspension of disbelief as that which takes place in an assembly of stockbrokers. Grown-up men and women who will not for a minute consider the reality of the unicorn, even as a symbol, will accept as rock-hard fact that they possess a share in the nation’s camel bellies, and in that belief they consider themselves happy and secure.”

  By the time Jonah had reached the end of this paragraph, the public square of Nineveh was deserted.

  For all these reasons, Jonah decided to escape both Nineveh and the Lord, and jumped on a ship headed for Tarshish.

  Now, the sailors in the ship that carried Jonah were all men from Joppa, a port not far from Nineveh, an outpost of the Ninevite empire. Nineveh was, as you have no doubt surmised, a society besotted by greed. Not ambition, which is a creative impulse, something all artists possess, but the sterile impulse to accumulate for the sake of accumulation. Joppa, however, had for many decades been a place where prophets had been allowed a tolerable amount of freedom. The people of Joppa accepted the yearly influx of bearded, ragged men and dishevelled, wild-eyed women with a certain degree of sympathy, since their presence procured Joppa free publicity when the prophets travelled abroad to other cities, where they often mentioned the name of Joppa in not unkind terms. Also, the recurrent prophesying season brought curious and illustrious visitors to Joppa, and neither the innkeepers nor the owners of the caravanserais complained of the demands made on their bed and board.