'With Deliberate Carelessness'

The oxymoronic form of the “prose poem” is best when the emphasis is on “prose,” not “poem.” Their chimeric nature usually cancels these little mutants. Baudelaire’s are sometimes interesting. Geoffrey Hill wrote some good ones in Mercian Hymns (1971). Otherwise, prose poems, the logical next step after free verse, arrive stillborn. Another occasional exception is Zbigniew Herbert. Included in Elegy for the Departure and Other Poems (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, 1999) is “Still Life”: 

“Violently separated from life, these shapes were scattered on the table with deliberate carelessness: a fish, an apple, a handful of vegetables mixed with flowers. A dead leaf of light has been added, and a bird with a bleeding head. In its petrified claws the bird clenches a small planet made of emptiness, and air taken away.”

 

The key phrase is “deliberate carelessness.” Recall that in “Delight in Disorder,” Robert Herrick sees “a wild civility.” Part of the charm of still-life painting is its humble, homely messiness. Herbert’s collection of essays Still Life with Bridle (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, 1991) is a meditation on the aesthetic legacy of seventeenth-century Holland. The title essay relates Herbert’s discovery, in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, of a painting by an artist previously unknown to him: Jan Simon van der Beeck (1589-1644), better known as Torrentius. The painting, the only work by him known to have survived, lent its title to the collection. Herbert describes it as “a calm, static still life,” depicting a clay pitcher, a half-filled glass goblet, a pewter pitcher, two porcelain pipes, paper with musical notations, a book and, difficult to identify without Herbert’s help, a bridle. He writes:

 

“The background was the most fascinating of all: black, deep as a precipice and at the same time as flat as a mirror, palpable and disappearing in perspectives of infinity. A transparent cover over the abyss.”

 

Near the end of his twenty-eight-page title essay, Herbert writes:

 

“So many questions. I did not manage to break the code. The enigmatic painter, the incomprehensible man, begins to pass from the plane of investigation based on flimsy sources to an indistinct sphere of fantasy, the domain of tellers of tales.”

 

Herbert’s essay reads like a mystery, with Herbert himself in the role of self-confessed failure as a detective. Who was Torrentius? Political martyr (an appealing figure for a poet in Poland under Soviet rule) or mad man? A civilized man can live with such ambiguities and uncertainties, and even relish them. Herbert hints that such mysteries are emblematic of civilization.

 

In Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature (1998), Guy Davenport devotes an entire playful, discursive, scholarly volume to the still life, starting with its origins in Egypt (food for the dead) and Israel (the Book of Amos). He writes:

 

“Still life is a minor art, and one with a residue of didacticism that will never bleach out; a homely art. From the artist’s point of view, it has always served as a contemplative form used for working out ideas, color schemes, opinions. It has the same relation to larger, more ambitious paintings as the sonnet to the long poem. . . . We must not, however, imagine that still life is inconsequential or trivial.”

 

And later:

 

“Still life belongs in the slow sinews of a great swell that began with the cultivation of wheat and the fermentation of wine, bread and wine being two of its permanent images. It is an art that is symbiotic with civilization.”

 

With calm confidence, Davenport makes typically audacious generalizations:

 

“In still life, down through history, we find an ongoing meditation on where matter ends and spirit begins, and on the nature of their interdependence. Joyce, who left no art untouched or unchallenged, deployed still lifes throughout his work. The first sentence of Ulysses is one: 'Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.'”

 

In a Keatsian manner, Herbert remains vexed by Torrentius and his still life. He can’t figure him out. “Thus it is time to part with Torrentius,” he writes.

 

“Farewell, still life.”

 

Herbert died twenty-five years ago today, on July 28, 1998, at age seventy-three.