From A Window

I am always skeptical of people who display a high degree of certainty about how the World works.  Such certainty is often grounded in politics, science, or theology.  Or narcissism.  Or madness.

How can they be so certain?  Part of me (a very small part) on occasion envies them:  such certainty makes things seem simpler.  It appears to provide an explanation for what confounds us.  (Seem and appears are the operative words.)  The World is beyond peradventure a confounding place, so I understand certainty's attraction.

Alas, my sole certainty is this:  the World shall for ever remain a mystery to me.  Take a look out the window.   Everything before you is a beautiful enigma.

                              From My Window

Now when the University students have abandoned
their game of bowls in the garden, with their cries of "Two" or "Six"
and the evening sky goes soured milk,

There are left the brightening windows of the rich owners of flats;
their meaningless finny gestures, dumb departures and entries;
a deaf man's theatre twenty times.

And quite indifferent towards the students or the rich
there are left the children of the poor, playing tag on a sandy waste,
and miles off southward ring the trams.

Alone on a building site a watchdog stalks by the fire,
wooed and repulsed by the jump-away flames, or raises its head
at a barking that chips a hole in distance.

Bernard Spencer, With Luck Lasting (Hodder and Stoughton 1963).

Carlo Pedreschi, "View from Duncan of Jordanstone College" (1976)

The quotidian (I use "quotidian" in an entirely affirmative, non-pejorative sense) is suffused with ineffable mystery.  Each of us, for instance: quotidian souls, each with infinite value.

               From My Window

An old man leaning on a gate
Over a London mews -- to contemplate --
Is it the sky above -- the stones below?
     Is it remembrance of the years gone by,
     Or thinking forward to futurity
That holds him so?

Day after day he stands,
Quietly folded are the quiet hands,
Rarely he speaks.
     Hath he so near the hour when Time shall end,
     So much to spend?
What is it he seeks?

Whate'er he be,
He is become to me
A form of rest.
     I think his heart is tranquil, from it springs
     A dreamy watchfulness of tranquil things,
And not unblest.

Mary Coleridge, in Theresa Whistler (editor), The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (Rupert Hart-Davis 1954).

I admire Coleridge's deference and discretion.  She speculates, but she does not attempt to caricature or pigeon-hole the man.  And her speculations are gentle and lovely:  "I think his heart is tranquil, from it springs/A dreamy watchfulness of tranquil things,/And not unblest."

Cedric Morris, "From a Window at 45 Brook Street, London" (1926)

Do we ever truly know ourselves?  How, then, can we presume to know others?  The worst sort of certainty is that certainty which makes assumptions about the soul of another.

                    Neighbours

From the bay windows
Of the mouldering hotel across the road from us
Mysterious, one-night itinerants emerge
On to their balconies
To breathe the cool night air.

We let them stare
In at our quiet lives.
They let us wonder what's become of them.

Ian Hamilton, Fifty Poems (Faber and Faber 1988).

James McIntosh Patrick, "The Tay Bridge from My Studio Window" (1948)

"A single grain of rice falling -- into the Great Barn."  So writes Po Chu-i. Such a realization is a source of freedom, not a sentence of doom.

                                               At the Window

But then I drew up the curtain and looked out of the window.  Yes, there it still was, the old External World,  still apparently quite unaware of its own non-existence.  I felt helpless, small-boyish before it:  I couldn't pooh-pooh it away.

Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia (1934).

There it is.  Out into the World you go.

                          The Window

Looking through a narrow window day by day
They behold the world go by on holiday;
Maid to man repeating "Love me while you may,"
All go by them, none returns to them:  they stay.

They behold love pass, and life passing away,
And each day puts on the face of yesterday,
And their hearts are sighing "Love me while you may,
Love is lovely, life is passing:  'tis to-day."

All shall be to-morrow, still the elders say;
Many lenten morrows come and pass away,
And the world goes by, and as of old time they
Looking through a narrow window watch the way.

Arthur Symons, Love's Cruelty (1923).

Anthony Eyton, "Open Window, Spitalfields" (1981)

An Interlude: The Hesperian Gardens

An interlude from my recent less-than-sanguine posts about the meaning of Life (involving Messrs. Henley, Belloc, and Larkin) is in order.  Fortunately, the Hesperian Gardens are close at hand.  I recently came upon this:

                                     Cadogan Gardens

     Out of the fog a dim figure accosted me.  'I beg your pardon, Sir, but could you tell me how to get to Cadogan Gardens?'
     'Cadogan Gardens?  I am afraid I am lost myself.  Perhaps, Sir,' I added (we two seemed oddly intimate in that white world of mystery together), 'perhaps, Sir, you can tell me where I can find the Gardens I am looking for?'  I breathed their name.
     'Hesperian Gardens?' the voice repeated.  'I don't think I have ever heard of Hesperian Gardens.'
     'Oh, surely!' I cried, 'the Gardens of the Sunset and the singing Maidens!'

Logan Pearsall Smith, More Trivia (1921).

"Hesperian Gardens"  in turn brought to mind a poem by Derek Mahon:

               The Blackbird

One morning in the month of June
I was coming out of this door
And found myself in a garden,
A sanctuary of light and air
Transplanted from the Hesperides,
No sound of machinery anywhere,
When from a bramble bush a hidden
Blackbird suddenly gave tongue,
Its diffident, resilient song
Breaking the silence of the seas.

Derek Mahon, Selected Poems (The Gallery Press/Viking 1991).

News-items

None of us is without fault.  And we all live in glass houses.  But, for those of us who presume to set the World -- and our fellow mortals -- aright, Nemesis patiently waits.

                                                  News-items

In spite of the delicacy of my moral feelings, and my unrelaxed solicitude for the maintenance of the right principles of conduct, I find I can read without tears of the retired Colonels who forge cheques, and the ladies of unexceptionable position who are caught pilfering furs in shops.  Somehow the sudden lapses of respected people, odd indecorums, backbitings, bigamies, embezzlements, and attempted chastities -- the surprising leaps they make now and then out of propriety into the police-courts -- somehow news-items of this kind do not altogether -- how shall I put it? -- well, they don't absolutely blacken the sunshine for me.

Logan Pearsall Smith, More Trivia (1921).

                                     Albrecht Durer, "Nemesis" (1502)

No Escape, Part Seven: "The Bliss Which Dreams And Blackbirds' Voices Promise, Of Which The Waves Whisper"

I wish to thank the erudite and generous Michael Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti (which I highly recommend) for introducing me to Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946).  Smith -- in his wry, tongue-in-cheek fashion -- recognized our (and his own) tendency to pine for an ideal land that harbors our long-sought happiness.

                                                  Where?

I, who move and breathe and place one foot before the other, who watch the Moon wax and wane, and put off answering my letters, where shall I find the Bliss which dreams and blackbirds' voices promise, of which the waves whisper, and hand-organs in streets near Paddington faintly sing?

Does it dwell in some island of the South Seas, or far oasis among deserts and gaunt mountains; or only in those immortal gardens pictured by Chinese poets beyond the great, cold palaces of the Moon?

               Poussin, "Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice" (1650)

                                                  Happiness

Cricketers on village greens, hay-makers in the evening sunshine, small boats that sail before the wind -- all these create in me the illusion of Happiness, as if a land of cloudless pleasure, a piece of the old Golden World, were hidden, not (as poets have fancied) in far seas or beyond inaccessible mountains, but here close at hand, if one could find it, in some undiscovered valley.  Certain grassy lanes seem to lead through the copses thither; the wild pigeons talk of it behind the woods.

               Poussin, "Landscape with Saint John on Patmos" (1640)

                                                  Somewhere

Somewhere, far below the horizon, there is a City; some day I shall sail to find its harbour; by what star I shall steer, or where the seaport lies, I do not know; but somehow or other through calms and storms and the sea-noises I shall voyage, until at last some mountain peak shall rise, telling me I am near my destination; or I shall see, at dusk, a lighthouse, twinkling at its port.

                           Poussin, "Landscape with Diogenes" (1647)

These short "pieces of moral prose" (as Smith described them) come from Smith's Trivia (1917) and More Trivia (1921).  Again, I thank Michael Gilleland for introducing me to Smith and his work.