`Make an Enigma of the Familiar'

Like all of his work, Guy Davenport’s Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature cunningly defies efforts to summarize it. His method is seemingly simple: He takes a recognizable category – in this case, still life painting – and from his vast learning and sensitivity to kinships – cultural, aesthetic, philosophical -- assembles a matrix of associations that enable us to see it new. His prose is at once focused and digressive. His mind is fresh and nimble, the opposite of bored.

The fourth essay in the volume, “Metaphysical Light in Turin,” starts with Nietzsche in the final months of his sanity, proceeds to De Chirico’s early work, moves on to Milton, Keats and Kipling, with stops along the way for Shelley, Claude Levi-Strauss, Charles Olson and Joyce, among others. Davenport is not name-dropping. He is orienting us to navigate the geography of the imagination. Casually, in the midst of all this energized linkage (energized with thought), Davenport takes time to define the very method he is utilizing:

“One way of recognizing verities is to look at them as if you had never seen them before, to make an enigma of the familiar.”

If I were pressed to summarize Davenport, to diminish his genius by reducing it, bumper-stick fashion, to a nugget of thought, that sentence would come close. The thought, of course, is not new. Others, some of whom Davenport acknowledged, said similar things. John Ruskin, for instance:

“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what he saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think. But thousands can think for one who can see. To see is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.”

And the photographer Walker Evans:

“Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”

And John Berger:

“Not to say that behind appearances is the truth, the Platonic way. It is very possible that visibility is the truth and that what lies outside visibility are only the `traces’ of what has been or will become visible.”

On July 29, 1857, Thoreau wrote in his journal:

“I am interested in an indistinct prospect, a distant view, a mere suggestion often, revealing an almost wholly new world to me. I rejoice to get, and am apt to present, a new view. But I find it impossible to present my view to most people. In effect, it would seem that they do not wish to take a new view in any case. Heat lightning flashes, which reveal a distant horizon to our twilight eyes. But my fellows simply assert that it is not broad day, which everybody knows, and fail to perceive the phenomenon at all. I am willing to pass for a fool in my own desperate, perhaps foolish, efforts to persuade them to lift the veil from off the possible and future, which they hold down with both their hands, before their eyes. The most valuable communication or news consists of hints and suggestions. When a truth comes to be known and accepted, it begins to be bad taste to repeat it. Every individual constitution is a probe employed in a new direction, and a wise man will attend to each one’s report.”

Davenport would have loved the Thoreau, and probably did.