Ends and Pieces - Matthew Arnold, Josef Pieper, and further thoughts on Imagination as Translator
A part of writing that I am reluctant to learn but forced to practice nevertheless is the brutal art of Cutting Things Out. I don’t know if other writers experience this (probably so - that’s why Editors were invented) but it is super difficult to edit your own writing because the mind knows what it means to say so it happily skips over holes in the work because it can automatically fill them in with what it knows is behind it. It's a whole other skill set to read something you've written as objectively as possible, as though you aren't you and you have no idea what the writer (who is you but not) is trying to say. You - the not-you you- are relying entirely on the writing alone. Does it communicate clearly what the author - who is you and yet not in this exercise - was trying to say? Or rather, do you understand the flow of argument? Does it make any sense at all? Does it communicate one continuous, sensical thought?
In the last piece I wrote, I wanted to include a brief gentle analysis of Matthew Arnold's poem, To Marguerite, Continued. But it felt too tangential. The not-me me was busy reading it over and over again, and repeatedly complained that it made the piece too bulky. It was a nice little part, she said, but it just made it too cumbersome to try to navigate back to The Point. So, chop chop. The not-me me is brutal.
It's so much easier to nix things, though, knowing I have my little loophole of "Ends and Pieces," cheerfully waiting to post the bulky, cumbersome chunks I have to slice off. And so I offer this chunky little piece for your reading pleasure, and with the consent of not-me me.
As we consider our experiences of Nature with sustained focus and with the intent to express what we see, we see it afresh, and that sight informs (forms inwardly) our perception of reality and increases it:
“The capacity to perceive the visible world ‘with our own eyes’ is indeed an essential constituent of human nature. We are talking here about man’s essential inner richness… To see things is the first step toward that primordial and basic mental grasping of reality, which constitutes the essence of man as a spiritual being. Those no longer able to see reality with their own eyes are equally unable to hear correctly. … What can be done? A…more immediately effective remedy is this: to be active oneself in artistic creation, producing shapes and forms for the eye to see. …The artist will be able to perceive with new eyes the abundant wealth of all visible reality, and, thus challenged, additionally acquires the inner capacity to absorb into his mind such a exceedingly rich harvest. The capacity to see increases.” Josef Piper, Only the Lover Sings (emphasis mine)
Pieper says that in the act of artistic creation, “the artist will be able to perceive with new eyes the abundant wealth of all visible reality.” We see more clearly when we allow our imagination to form the raw Natural image into a “poetic vision.” In the Matthew Arnold poem, To Marguerite, Continued, he begins by describing his first impressions, a sort of “on the face of things” perception of reality:
“Yes! In the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping follow,
And then their endless bounds they know.
But then he says that his experiences of Natural Beauty, over time and in many different places, give a different perspective:
But when the moon their hollows lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour –
Oh! Then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent;
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain—
Oh might our marges meet again!
You can hear the longing in the verse, the desire to unite with the beauty that calls to us, “There was more! There is more!”
The poem ends:
Who order'd, that their longing's fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cool'd?
Who renders vain their deep desire?—
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.
While the ending leaves my Christian sensibilities cold, it is a coldness Arnold intends us to feel. The desire fades too quickly. And when it fades, we are left alone, stranded on isolated isles bound by the cold salt sea. Arnold touches on something Lewis observed in the Weight of Glory: “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
When our longing’s fire cools, we lose the connection we had with Nature which took us beyond Nature even as we went deeper into our experience of Nature, to Reality. We can’t understand what it says to us without the longing that awakens Imagination. We need our Imagination standing as translator so that we can remember what we heard when our ears were tuned by longing.
Nature enters our Imagination through our senses, and these senses must be trained and quickened to notice in their particular ways all the particular parts of an experience. As J.C. Shairp wrote:
“The poet is in his proper place, not when he scrutinized nature as an analyst, but when he unreservedly accepts all her concrete appearances as they come to him. Forms and colors are given him through the eye; sounds as they reach him through the ear; fragrances as wafted to his sense of smell. On this side of analysis there is enough, and more than enough, for him. The outward appearances he feels more intensely, and renders into words more graphically than ordinary men, -- no other describes them so to the quick, -- yet he does not rest in them, but passes with them inward and brings them into relation with his own being, or rather with the universal heart of man.”
Further on, he writes:
“…quite endless is the wealth of meaning that lies hid in Nature, the interchange of appeal and response that is possible between the world without and the world within. There is in Nature just as much or as little as the soul of each can see in her. And in order to see, the soul must have been trained for it both by habitual converse with the outward world, and also by converse with other regions of being, with other teachers. For other teachers are not less necessary that the beauty which lies in the face of Nature.” (emphasis mine)
Our senses need opportunities to practice and improve their natural abilities. They need experiences to notice details and hone their skills to a mastery. If we want to see, we must needs look, and not just look but attend and notice. And not just attend and notice but respond and express. This is how we develop our poetic sensibilities.
“Poetry” he says, “is the emanation, the golden exhalation, which arises from the close and vivid meeting of the soul and the object.” I love that he describes poetry as the act of breathing out. We breathe in the beauty we see, the oxygen nourishes our blood, and we exhale in a “golden exhalation.” That phrase, “the golden exhalation,” has a sense of slowness about it. It’s like the satisfied sigh after a delicious meal.
At first, as I was thinking through this, I thought the metaphor of a chisel on marble was an appropriate aid to thought; that Imagination was the artisan and raw Nature the marble that it hammers into shape. Sort of like Michelangelo’s “I saw an angel in the marble and I carved until I set him free.” I think that for the artist this is likely an appropriate metaphor, but for the non-artist, the amateur who is the audience of the artist and who is actively cultivating what Charlotte Mason calls “the Beauty Sense,” I think our attempts at narrating our experiences through “artistic creation” is not so much a chiseling as it is a translation of the foreign language of Natural Beauty into the mother tongue of the Imagination.
P.S.
Dust of Snow
By Robert Frost
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
Comments
Post a Comment