#265

http://billybedamned.livejournal.com/5106.html

“I don’t know one damned butterfly from another”—in my world, that’s either an occasion for loud pity, or them’s fightin’ words. “my ignorance of the stars is formidable.” Well, I see right away that this poem is getting, once again—and I think in an interesting way—at the difference between actual life-in-the-physical-universe-as-we-know-it on one hand, with its bugs and winking stars, and the abstract life of the mind on the other. B. cast his lot with mind and imagination, creating a world of internalized impressions and confessions and broadcasting them via printed language, much more formalized, even mannerist, than he’s sometimes given credit for, I think. Working as he does out of that ultra-linguistic mode, this is also where his input comes from. Not the world: Other’s impressions and confessions of their experiences of the world, and the new worlds they imagine. He’s like an über-capitalist/economist who thinks that money comes from buying and trading stocks, and that the resources that are exploited to create more wealth and “economic growth” are inexhaustible—because the radical economist really in the end only regards them as abstractions, figments. B. works in words, ideas and fantasies rather than money, but he too has forgotten that language has its roots in the earth. My literary/philosophical training is in nature writing, which proposes an intermediate realm where writers dream up “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” This quote is from Marianne Moore, the poet, and she understood the goal and the problem with it. My dissertation advisor, with whom I sparred pretty often, since I didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t toe his totally linguistic line—“Realistic fiction is mental masturbation”—once told me that “you can’t throw a handful of dirt in your dissertation.” Maybe he’s right, and from his point of view he knows he is, but I quarrel with that. It’s complicated, but linguistic life and biological life are woven of the same cloth. I have no idea what my diss. advisor, Tom, would think of Berryman, though I doubt he would think too highly of his self-absorption, but he’s probably more on board with B.’s not knowing the butterflies than he is with my knowing the Latin name and habits of every damn one, dreaming about them, painting huge paintings of them, planting my yard to attract them, and spotting one camouflaged motionless on the gravel on the side of the road as I roar past at eighty miles per hour. (Not kidding about that either.)

B. (and Tom) are separating the world from the mind. I won’t put any more words in Tom’s mouth, because he has my gratitude and respect till the day I die—he bore with me while I struggled—but I can respond to Berryman. He’s separating poetry from the physical world. A nature writer takes on the paradoxical task of bridging them. Here’s the thing about the world: We know in a sense that it’s somehow actual, but our perception is a figment anyway. Annie Dillard takes this on in her essay “Seeing,” in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, where she reports on the observations of patients able to see for the first time in their lives because of a cataract operation:

In general the newly sighted see the world as a dazzle of color-patches. They are pleased by the sensation of color, and learn quickly to name the colors, but the rest of seeing is tormentingly difficult. Soon after his operation a patient “generally bumps into one of these colour-patches and observes them to be substantial, since they resist him as tactual objects do.”

In other words, for the newly sighted, the sensations suddenly appearing before their first-time-functioning eyes mean nothing until the brain learns to interpret the signals the eyes are now sending it. Sensation is a construct! It is a brain creation. Is this different from a word-creation? I don’t think so, not as much as we might think, but we’re so fluent in the learned language of brain-creation that we think “blue” has some sort of intrinsic blueness, or even that blue is blue. Blue, whatever it might be—and there’s no way of knowing what it is—it is anything but what we think of as blue.

So I can sort of think the worlds of actual nature and fantasized literature back together if I try, by acknowledging that everything I know about nature is also a brain-constructed fiction anyway. B. has no interest in that. For him, nature is out there, over there, and if he reads Thoreau, well he might get some inkling of it, but otherwise, he’s more interested in words. The reference to Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is telling. Yeats wrote, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” For Yeats, this was a modernist statement, written in 1919, about the disintegration of pre-modern certainties that had always held the focus of Western philosophy—God the Father, the preeminence of Western civilization, etc., which was coming apart at the seams at the turn of the century and was greatly accelerated by WWI. Philosophy is grounded in the world if it means anything, but it’s linguistic in its essence. B. turns the whole notion over. He pays tribute to the linguistical brilliance and personal influence of Yeats’s work, but also there’s this bitter bit of irony to the whole thing: It’s B.’s body that’s falling apart not his mental world. But when the body goes, the brain goes, and there go the brain’s constructs along with it. The mental world does fall apart. But it’s his physical center that isn’t holding, and it’s because he didn’t pay attention to it. Too late came the lesson: There is no life of the mind without a body, just like there is no economy without ecology either. You ignore butterflies at your own peril! This is a profound and bitter lesson. Danaus plexippus, Eurytides marcellus, Papilio glaucus, Colias eurytheme—there is life and delight, but now I also see there is solidity and metaphysical security in these amazing creatures. I’m quite glad I know them.