On naïve reading

Henri Matisse said: “You study, you learn, but you guard the original naïveté. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.”

(Taking the point further, Lady Bracknell does “not approve of anything which tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate, exotic fruit. Touch it, and the bloom is gone!”)

I have to agree with Matisse. Naïveté, or to be more precise, naive enjoyment and wonder, do need to be guarded against the erosions of study and learning. Study and learning add immeasurably to understanding, but they do sometimes threaten joy, which ought to be a primary goal of art.

Robert Pippin writes a Defence of Naïve Reading in the NY Times blog, which makes the point more emphatically. Excessive learning, particularly where it strays into the worst kinds of self-indulgent theorising, detracts from the simple pleasure of reading, so that it's no wonder students aren't attracted in the numbers they were to tertiary courses in literature or writing. The teachers I learned most from at university were those that gave me knowledge without taking away pleasure. Pleasure increased as knowledge increased. Indeed pleasure was understood as that Hesperidian island towards which we were sailing, not merely a by-product of our interest in boats.

Poetry is...

...indefinable. The prolific attempts to define it probably tell us more about its nature than any one definition. Nevertheless, there are some great lines trying to fill in this preeminent blank. Here’s a goodly number of them. The list doesn't include Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s line from the first in the House of Life sonnet sequence: “A sonnet is a moment's monument.” That to me is as good a definition as any.

Indefinability, though, is a palpable quality, not the absence of a quality. Saying we don't know the nature of something is not the same as saying it has no nature. American poet Marianne Moore, admired by TS Eliot, said “I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.” Poetry shouldn't be a basket into which anything indefinable can go. The same applies to art. Art is not that which falls short of reality but that which goes beyond it.

Catch the heart off guard

Looking through previous Nobel literature winners for a poem, I had to go back as far as 1995 to find a winner who was primarily a poet. From Seamus Heaney, I liked this beachy poem “Postscript.” 

And some time make the time to drive out west

Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

What a lark! What a plunge!

Since we've had quite a bit of poetry this week, here's one of my favourite bits of prose: the opening words of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. If prose is to walking what poetry is to dancing, then this is prose cutting in.

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning — fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”— was that it?—“I prefer men to cauliflowers”— was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace — Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished — how strange it was!— a few sayings like this about cabbages.

The world's contracted thus

Donne is in my head today. As in “The Sun Rising,” this poem describes being in love as a contraction of the world to the experience of the lovers, or an expansion of the lovers to fill or obliterate the world. Love is a world, and “makes one little room, an everywhere.” This is apt for the towering, obsessive, almost destructive love of Shakespeare’s sonnets or some of Donne’s early work, but I think it also fits the quiet, steadfast love of a life lived in “one little room,” as John and Ann Donne's was - needing nothing else, because “nothing else is.” It fits both love's annexing and love's foreswearing of the world. This is “The Good Morrow.”

I wonder, by my truth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved; were we not weaned till then,
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?

’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.

And now good morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room, an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess our world; each hath one and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp North, without declining West?
Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one; or thou and I
Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die.