“A
section of our list might have read like this: Beauty, carburetor, sheepshank,
pagoda, absence, chalk, vector, Amarillo, garters, dromedary, Tartarus, tupelo,
omelet, caboose, ferrocyanide and so on. As you can imagine, we did not
complete our list; we got tired of it. As in random compositions of all kinds —
musical, pictorial, or verbal — it was possible to sustain interest for only so
long, in the absence of deliberate human meaning.”
Without
saying so, Wilbur casts out the surrealists, John Ashbery and the Language
Poets from the company of writers who are even pretending to sustain a reader’s
interest. But Wilbur, the most unpretentiously refined of poets, forgives his
younger self: “Nevertheless, there had been a genuine impulse underlying our
afternoon’s diversion, and I think that it stemmed from a primitive desire that
is radical to poetry — the desire to lay claim to as much of the world as
possible through uttering the names of things.” We understand the impulse, if
not always the motive Wilbur assigns it. Rather than wishing to “lay a claim”
to the world, the writer of such a catalog is celebrating its bounty and, in
some cases, making fun of its profligacy. Consider Keats’ April 18, 1819,
letter to his brother George, describing his sole meeting with Coleridge, a
fabled gas bag:
“In
those two Miles he broached a thousand things--let me see if I can give you a
list--Nightingales, Poetry – on Poetical sensation – Metaphysics – Different
genera and species of Dreams – Nightmare – a dream accompanied by a sense of
Touch – A dream related – First and second consciousness—the difference
explained between will and Volition…Monsters—the Kraken—Mermaids—Southey believes
in them—Southey’s belief too much diluted—A ghost story—Good morning…”
Whenever
I return to Keats’ Coleridge catalog, I’m heartened. Keats was twenty-three, a
year earlier he had composed the great odes, and he was less than two years
away from death. Coleridge was forty-four, had written most of his best poems years
earlier and had another fifteen years to live. There’s sadness in this, and
encouragement. You can sense Keats’ impulse to patronize the older poet, but it’s
tempered by respect. Wilbur, writing of a passage in Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Doolittle, observes that “such a
catalogue makes us feel vicariously alert.” He goes on: “That is what the
cataloguing impulse almost always expresses — a longing to possess the whole
world, and to praise it, or at least to feel it.” A primitive form of the
impulse is rampant in Whitman (and Thomas Wolfe, and Carl Sandburg, and Jack Kerouac). More
systematic and celebrative are the catalogs of the great English prose writers
of the seventeenth century. Moved by impulses both spiritual and scientific,
Burton and Browne seem to be praising creation by listing its components. As
the epigraph to his novel The Dog of the
South (1979), Charles Portis uses a passage from Chapter III of Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus (1658):
“Even
Animals near the Classis of plants, seem to have the most restlesse motions.
The Summer-worm of Ponds and plashes makes a long waving motion; the hair-worm
seldom lies still. He that would behold a very anomalous motion, may observe it
in the Tortile and tiring strokes of Gnatworms.”
But
that is rigorously restrained by Browne's customary standards. His books amount to lists of lists. This comes several pargraphs earlier in Chapter III, and I suggest you read it aloud:
“The
Æquivocall production of things under undiscerned principles, makes a large
part of generation, though they seem to hold a wide univocacy in their set and
certain Originals, while almost every plant breeds its peculiar insect, most a
Butterfly, moth or fly, wherein the Oak seems to contain the largest
seminality, while the Julus, Oak, apple, dill, woolly tuft, foraminous roundles
upon the leaf, and grapes under ground make a Fly with some difference. The
great variety of Flyes lyes in the variety of their originals, in the seeds of
Caterpillars or Cankers there lyeth not only a Butterfly or Moth, but if they
be sterill or untimely cast, their production is often a Fly, which we have
also observed from corrupted and mouldred Egges, both of Hens and Fishes; To
omit the generation of Bees out of the bodies of dead Heifers, or what is
stranger yet well attested, the production of Eeles in the backs of living Cods
and Perches.”
Wilbur
says in his essay that “when a catalogue has a random air, when it seems to
have been assembled by chance, it implies a vast reservoir of other things
which might just as well have been mentioned.” Last month, on March 1, we celebrated his ninety-third birthday.
2 comments:
I recall some hilarious lists in Rabelais's Gargantua, especially a scatological list of card games.
I like the curious lists you have chosen in a post that is itself a kind of list (with attached musings that wander around the idea of lists and also around ideas of youth vs. age, gassiness vs. structure) of writers I like.
Post a Comment