The
But I would like to resist that pressure; I would like to retrieve and save all those first snapshots; and to assert that it is not the second or third glance but the first which is the true one.
* * *
Certain individuals seem to possess the beautiful features of a child who is continually (and inadvertently) crushed, withered and burned by the world, that is, by the world of other people. Such individuals provoke in one a desire to hold them, to shield them, to console them. But one is at a loss: one soon discovers that the child wants no consolation: he wants only to evaporate.
* * *
Surfing the moment: I went to the Cooper Hewitt to look a second time at the poodles on the wallpaper.
This time I felt nothing—they seemed silly and dull: the charm had diminished by a quantum. I was a little disturbed—I felt that perhaps after all there really was nothing to them, and therefore perhaps there was nothing to any of the things that have ever charmed me, that have ever filled me with longing and sweetness and energy. I looked at the other things: jewelry, furniture, plates—everything looked cheap and stupid.
All this led me to glance, as though through a telescope, at past periods of despair, and I realized that it was this feeling—that nothing in the world existed for me or held any charm for me—it was this feeling that pervaded my black days of depression.
But I decided that the circumstances that produce such delights or that make such delights possible are complex and irreducible: I must be in a particular frame of mind, and I must encounter a particular kind of object. I do not know how to arrange these things, nor do I know whether it is possible to do so. But I do know that I must somehow seal my memories of those serendipitous pleasures, and not allow them to be destroyed by my foolish attempts to recreate them.
There was a time when I treated such encounters lightly because I felt confident that I would encounter their like again, that beauty is somehow conserved in the world as though in a savings bank.
But as the years pass, I have begun to wonder whether any particular beauty actually recurs; I begin to regret not having taken a few moments longer to contemplate some unnamed pleasure, to curate for the museum of my mind some scarcely-formed bliss.
But then again I wonder, if I had indeed been of a mind to make all the inspections and calculations necessary to appropriate such an object for myself, would not this very act of appropriation have made my pleasure less intense, less memorable?
It seems to me that the difficult thing is to arrange our lives and our emotions in such a way that we are susceptible to beauty; so that we may gauge almost without thinking exactly how long, from what distance, and from which angle or angles an object should be viewed; with which sense or combination of senses it should be experienced; and in what terms it should be considered and contemplated after we have experienced it. We should be able to gauge whether certain kinds of pleasures are appropriate for us at certain periods in our lives. We should know when to postpone a pleasure.
All this would be the beginning of an art of living.
* * *
Apropos of
* * *
I have sometimes wondered whether flowers, in their greening up from the ground and blossoming, were struggling to free themselves from this world and to ascend to more vital spheres: as if to be uprooted were their deepest desire.
* * *
Certain species of sharks are so beautifully shaped, and move with such grace, that they seem to be like materializations of the mind of the element in which they move. In fact, it seems to me that the sculpting of their bodies by the forces of time and mutation has reached a kind of perfection that we cannot fully grasp, blinded as we are by our instinctive fear of them, and by our human sense of duration.
* * *
It has always been certain panicky brushes with unnameable menaces that I associate so immemorially with New York, with the City; these fears that fascinate me endlessly—not the vulgar reality of seductions and corruptions, but the (beautiful; intriguing; whispered) intimations of predation, of cannibalization, of death, of the infinite, that lie always behind grinning faces in nightclubs, and in the shadows of buildings, and under railroad tracks, like the ancestral memories of death out of the blue of the ocean, out of the green of the jungle, out of the dead leaves of the forest.
* * *
A sunrise in New York (10 December 1990): a veil of periwinkle clouds hangs inert like unstirred cream at the bottom of a cup of coffee; the veil rent ragged along certain horizontal lines, revealing, behind those gaps, a lighter and more saturated blue that seems, however, to be painted over the veil. From the roof one can see, divided into an irregular panel by the still dark, rectilinear forms of the low buildings (like hands that frame a portion of the sky), mother-of-pearl shades of blue, pink, coral and orange. Below, a square of river, with rippling waters that seem to flow north and south simultaneously, as though continually doubling back on itself, the river a cobalt shade of blue.
When I try to imagine all the different kinds of sunrises that may appear in a year, and year after year in the duration of the City, I like to think of these sunrises as reducible to a deck of painted cards, one of which is dealt freshly each new morning of the world.
Yet the idea that this day is but a reiteration of a past day is only a small illusion of perspective and time: for we know that the earth wobbles on its axis, that the ice ages come and go erratically; that the universe veers out of control and runs itself down like an overexuberant child playing on a beach... We try not to take it personally.
* * *
When, in the occasional tranquility of my room, I think of all the transformations and transpositions of things that have conspired to produce this moment in this city, and when I hear the composite noise of it all resolving itself into a sweet continuous sound, very much like a surf, I sometimes feel as though the sound were a delicate communication which I cannot quite decipher, and the meaning of which it would be a great delight to know.
* * *
While watching a scene in Shampoo (a waste of a movie), it occurred to me that the artist takes fragments of the barest strip of experience in time (a mere wink of the eye of the universe), compares them to what he sees in the works that have preceded him, and plays them over and over in his or her mind like a tape, changing this, altering that, putting this next to that, sifting, digging and squeezing out imperfect memory in order to weave the delicate tissue of truth, of essence, of the transcendent.
And somehow in all this, perhaps the accumulation of great works of art and science represents a gradual shoring up of the greatness of the human mind (which may also be the greatness of the nonhuman mind: the order represented by the earth and the harmonies or wonderful dissonances of all its animate and inanimate host) against chaos: perhaps one could even glimpse the possibility of art and science someday vanquishing chaos: why not even be so absurd as to wonder whether the day were not so far away as one might think?
There is another scene of trees along a road seen from above; it made me wish that the suburban blandness of the road, and hence of all the sterility that separates one imaginary place from another, were nothing but a relay, a tenuous connection of no consequence.
* * *
Romance of the flowering trees: when I discovered that the certain trees (next to the high-rise complex on the south side of 32nd Street between Lexington and Third) that had made me so rapturous last spring were starting to bloom, the first thing I felt was surprise, because it seemed to me that it had happened later in the season last year.
Last year I had promised myself to record the stages of their blooming. But now I hesitated, wishing only to contemplate them and to compare my present emotions with my emotions of last year.
I promised myself also that I would learn the tree’s name: about this, too, I hesitated, half-fearing it would diminish my pleasure, half-hoping it would increase it.
The idea that occurred to me on contemplating the buds was how much they resembled insects: pink butterflies or moths, developing in cocoons: and so I fancied that the butterfly might owe the idea of its metamorphosis to the ancient intelligence of flowers, that perhaps a butterfly were no more than a bloom which had, thanks to the endless strivings of its ancestors the flowers, found a way of fulfilling its desire to break free of its branch and fly away into the summer. (This idea in turn would illuminate the beautiful erotic interdependence of butterfly and flower.)
I expect this idea must seem like a sentimental commonplace to people who know something about horticulture or natural history, but it seemed so charming and true to me that I felt the pleasure of its newness as though I had been the first to discover it.
As the trees opened their blossoms little by little each day, I noted in myself a slight feeling of disappointment. The trees this year seemed different: though I still felt pleasure in contemplating them, I had not yet been able to recover the same feeling of bliss. Again I felt a sadness, as though I had lost a certain capacity for experiencing beauty, a capacity that depended as much on a new susceptibility as on the beauty of the external forms.
Still another thing that surprised me, in my ignorance, was that the trees had not all budded and bloomed at the same rate; while some flowers appeared nearly in full bloom, others remained still closed. I wondered whether this mistiming could be in some cases catastrophic for reproduction.
I compared this possibility of catastrophe to the phenomenon of love among human males (and females, and all sorts of humans who, for one reason or another, do not reproduce). It seemed to me that the expression of the individual form and beauty and life of the tree was at least as important as its capacity to reproduce; and so it was with humans.
Of what value is reproduction for its own sake? Of what value is the reproduction of hideousness and of forms that add nothing to life and take nothing from it? Even Nature knows that reproduction is merely reproduction; that what is important is the sum, the increase of beauty, which is the form that aspires to flight, like the butterfly.
* * *
Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? I am, George, I am. Because the genius and lucidity of her writing, the ways in which she compasses and arranges and makes splendid the particular violence and near-madness of the emotion, as does Goya in painting (it strikes me now that in many ways she is an artist of Panic) at once elates me to the verge of tears (I am almost continually on the verge of tears as I read The Waves) and shames me deeply. It pains me to know that I could never write like that (the childish presumption and stupidity of measuring oneself against genius! but is it so ignoble to point oneself toward it as an arrow to a target?).
For a moment I wonder if the quality of Woolf’s achievement would be greater than that of Proust (as if I could objectively judge, having read Proust in translation only), and I fancy I sense “between the lines” Woolf’s own egotism vitiating, ever so slightly, her work, as though saying, “I am the greatest one, I am the one who will be remembered, you cannot fathom me,” though at the same time: “I know my weakness, I know what I am not, I have failed, my words shall be scattered and forgotten.” But I say that both are great, that the tools they invented to grapple the monsters and to engrave a new beauty are merely different.
* * *
View of
The mild amber evening sea slides in again and again like great overlapping sheets of mica.
Harmless momentary integrity of a pink-bottomed cloud.
At times I think we are on the earth merely to fix and affirm the supreme indelibility of things as they appear in a moment of time. This is what is so impossible and futile and divine about human beings—our constitutional indifference to the inevitability of decay, destruction, death. The snapshot, the fragment, the stillness that appears to us as the truth—the beautiful old pier, in a continuum of decay, its beams tilting towards dissolution, and, at the same time, the old pier, perfect, fixed, eternal.
Our observing, our duration, is as though an eye from nowhere opened once, saw, and closed itself again forever—as though a sun broke through the dark clouds and shined on the ocean in brilliance and clarity and completeness, only to disappear again into obscurity...
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