`The Attention We Pay to the Wholeness of the World'

Only now, almost three years after his death, has the vulgar reality of Guy Davenport’s absence, the knowledge that no more essays, stories or letters will issue from Lexington, Ky., that my truest educator (“to lead out,” to which I mentally add, “of ignorance”) has left me with only the lessons of his life and work – only now does this dark knowledge illuminate my days. I often think of Guy as I live, read and write, and I thought of him again on Friday as I read Eric Ormsby’s “Microcosm”:

“The proboscis of the drab grey flea
Is mirrored in the majesty
Of the elephant’s articulated trunk. There’s a sea
In the bed-mite’s dim orbicular eye.
Pinnacles crinkle when the mountain-winged, shy
Moth wakes up and stretches for the night.
Katydids enact the richly patterned light
Of galaxies in their chirped and frangible notes.
The smallest beings harbor a universe
Of telescoped similitudes. Even those Rocky Mountain goats
Mimic Alpha Centauri in rectangular irises
Of cinnabar-splotched gold. Inert viruses
Replicate the static of red-shifted, still chthonic
Cosmoi. Terse
As the listened brilliance of the pulsar’s bloom
The violaceous mildew in the corner room
Proliferates in Mendelian exuberance.
There are double stars in the eyes of cyclonic
Spuds shoveled and spaded up. The dance
Of Shiva is a cobbled-soled affair –
Hobnails and flapping slippers on the disreputable stair.
Yggdrasils
Germinate on Wal-Mart windowsills.”

Whatever acuity of vision I possess I honed on Guy’s example, and Ormsby shares it. We can never see too much or know too much, and nothing is beneath the dignity of our knowing, regardless of its seeming tawdriness or triviality – even Wal-Mart. In his translation of Herakleitos, the pre-Socratic sage who ranked among of Guy’s educators, he writes:

“Men who wish to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details.”

The Greek, we notice, says nothing about the significance or elegance of the details, only their particularity. And in his inspired essay on the fiction of Eudora Welty, “That Faire Field of Enna” (collected in The Geography of the Imagination), he writes:

“The artist shows the world as if meaning were inherent in its particulars. We dress biological imperative in custom and ritual; the artist dresses it in analogy, and finds design in accident and rhythm in casualness. That every event is unique and every essence distinct from all others rarely interests the artist, for whom event is pattern and essence melodic.”

And this, one page later:

“Art is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world. Ancient intuition went foraging after consistency. Religion, science, and art are alike rooted in the faith that the world is of a piece, that something is common to all its diversity, and that if we knew enough we could see and give a name to its harmony.”