Purposefulness

For his birthday I ordered my brother the two collections of Zbigniew Herbert’s essays available in English – Barbarian in the Garden and Still Life with Bridle. The latter arrived Monday, 16 days after I ordered it and 12 days after my brother’s birthday. It came “illuminated”; that is, with copious underlining, and flowers drawn in the margins. The previous owner, Amy Murphy, felt strongly enough about Herbert’s work to sign the volume and get rid of it.

Buying the books for my brother renewed my interest in them. Herbert’s sensibility is stringent but not misanthropic, which made his words soothing after I had spent time exploring previously unknown regions of the literary blogosphere, looking for material and names to add to my blog roll. I returned empty-handed but with the renewed conviction that those with the least to say often spend the most time saying it. One fellow in particular, who seems intelligent and fairly well read, has posted miles of words that aspire after incoherence. His sentences begin as though he has something to tell you, only to dissolve like fog as the sun rises. In contrast, here is the conclusion of “The Price of Art,” from Still Life with Bridle:

“It is we who are poor, very poor. A major part of contemporary arts declares itself on the side of chaos, gesticulates in a void, or tells the story of its own barren soul.

“The old masters – all of them without exception –could repeat after Racine, `We work to please the public.’ Which means they believed in the purposefulness of their work and the possibility of interhuman communication. They affirmed visible reality with an inspired scrupulousness and childish seriousness, as if the order of the world and the revolution of the stars, the permanence of the firmament, depended on it.

“Let such naïveté be praised.”

“Interhuman communication” is jargon, and I have no doubt Herbert’s original Polish is more graceful and, well, more human, but it serves to signify precisely the opposite intent of the long-winded blogger I mentioned earlier. About his work there is no suggestion of purposefulness, or even the possibility of purposefulness. Under the sway of some silly pseudo-philosophical creed, he would probably deny that “meaning” and “purpose” and “communication” (and probably “human”) have any meaning at all. In his review of Herbert’s The Collected Poems: 1956-1998 in the Washington Post, Anthony Cuda wrote:

“The new Collected Poems leaves no doubt about the place of Herbert's work in 20th-century letters, which rivals that of W. H. Auden or Elizabeth Bishop in its originality, imaginative breadth and humane vigilance.”

I thought of Cuda and his mention of Auden when Herbert spoke so admiringly of the “old masters.” One of Auden’s anthology pieces is “Musée des Beaux Arts,” written in December 1938, after the anschluss and the Munich capitulation.

“About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

“In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”