“The most beautiful order of the world is still
a random gathering of things insignificant in themselves.”
I read this for the first time while editing a
weekly newspaper in Northwestern Ohio, my first job in journalism, a trade for which I was entirely untrained. “Editor” sounds grandiose, though it was
my title. I wrote and edited most of the copy, and took photographs, which is
how I taught myself to use a .35-mm camera and process film. Some of my
favorite modern artists have been photographers – Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Wright Morris – and for a
few years I presumed to ape their art. In the summer of 1980 I pulled over when
I spied a collapsed barn partially concealed by weeds and vines. In the fallen
building I discovered a readymade still life – knotted boards, a rusted spiral of
cable, a dried-out thistle and, at the center of this arrangement of diagonals
and loops, an empty bird’s nest: “a random gathering of things insignificant in
themselves.” I captured a perfectly
realistic abstraction. The Toledo Blade
sponsored a photo contest, I entered and won in some non-portrait,
non-landscape category, and the paper reproduced my picture in its Sunday
supplement. I’ve hardly taken another photograph.
“Everything
flows; nothing remains. [Everything moves; nothing is still. Everything passes
away; nothing lasts.]” (Fragment 2)
Somewhere
I have a copy of that Sunday supplement, but no prints or negatives. I last
visited Williams County twenty-five years ago, during the same trip in which I visited
Guy Davenport for the first and only time. Presumably, the barn has dissolved
into the soil or been replaced by a parking lot. I’ve just learned that Jack
Bryce, the guy who gave me that first newspaper job a lifetime ago has died at age ninety-three. Jack didn’t teach me how to write but gave me the opportunity
to teach myself while getting paid to do so. I think of Jack, a serious jazz
fan, whenever I listen to Bill Evans, who died Sept. 15, 1980. At Jack’s urging,
I wrote a eulogy for Evans and published it in our weekly. This convergence –
Davenport/Heraclitus/Jack Bryce/Bill Evans – condensed while reading Eva Brann’s
The Logos of Heraclitus (Paul Dry
Books, 2011). After identifying him as the only solitary, non-conversing figure
in Raphael’s fresco The School of Athens,
the one writing with eyes averted, she writes:
“That
is Heraclitus, an engaged solitary, an inward-turned observer of the world,
inventor of the first of philosophical genres, the thought-compacted aphorism,
prose that could contend with poetry. It is linguistically ingenious, teasingly
obscure in reputation, but hard-hittingly clear in fact. Each saying contains a
concentrated drop of meaning—the kind of writing one would often stop to look away from. Such a style, tense and
beautiful, seems to be favored by people who find harsh realism exhilarating.”
Penned this the other day.
ReplyDelete"A determinist philosopher denied free will feeling that philosophy was in his DNA."
Was wondering, would it qualify as an aphorism?