Some fugitive thinkers among us long for order in a manner almost nostalgic:
“I envied
those past ages of the world
When, as I
thought, the energy in things
Shone
through their shapes, when sun and moon no less
Than tree or
stone or star or human face
Were seen
but as fantastic japanese
Lanterns are
seen, sullen or gay colors
And lines
revealing the light that they conceal.”
We can read “the
energy in things” as scientists do, I suppose, or mystics. Howard Nemerov weighs
both understandings in “The Loon’s Cry.” He yearns for order in a fashion
characteristic of the twentieth century. He can be neither devoutly religious
nor vulgarly atheistic. He experiences no sense of conviction, unless
uncertainty can be conviction. What animating principle orders the world? In a
poem from a decade later, “Figures of Thought,” Nemerov sees patterns
everywhere:
“To lay the
logarithmic spiral on
Sea shell
and leaf alike, and see it fit,
To watch the
same idea work itself out
In the
fighter pilot’s steepening, tightening turn
Onto his
target, setting up the kill,
And in the
flight of certain wall-eyed bugs
Who cannot
see to fly straight into death
But have to
cast their sidelong glance at it
And come but
cranking to the candle’s flame—
“How secret
that is, and how privileged
One feels to
find the same necessity
Ciphered in
forms diverse and otherwise
Without
kinship-that is the beautiful
In nature as
in art, not obvious,
Not inaccessible,
but just between.
“It may
diminish some our dry delight
To wonder if
everything we are and do
Lies subject
to some little law like that;
Hidden in
nature, but not deeply so.”
Nemerov
longs for pattern, some “little law,” but it remains elusive. Some choose to
believe out of desperation and mundane impatience. Not the poet. Here, again,
from “The Loon’s Cry”:
“I
simplified still more, and thought that now
We’d traded
all those mysteries in for things,
For essences
in things, not understood—
Reality in
things! and now we saw
Reality
exhausted all their truth.”
I first heard
the cry of a loon more than thirty years ago at Pyramid Lake in the
Adirondacks. It sounded mournful at first, like the call of a louder, more self-pitying dove. But then you hear a cry that might be the sound of a child being tortured.
It’s bewitching after a while, once we stop anthropomorphizing. But the chill
doesn’t go away, especially when heard in the middle of the night in your cabin
on the shore. After hearing the loon’s “laughter of desolation,” Nemerov
writes:
“A savage
cry, now that the moon went up
And the sun
down--yet when I heard him cry
Again, his
voice seemed emptied of that sense
Or any
other, and Adam I became,
Hearing the
first loon cry in paradise.”