9
Fifth Way: Floral Supposition
When we look through literary passages that are particularly brilliant in prompting us to create moving pictures, we find an inexplicably high number of them have flowers or vegetable matter braided into their folds. In the passage in Madame Bovary where Charles spills a drink on a taffeta gown, Flaubert has us imagine not simply a swaying patch of transparent liquid closing in on a patch of red, but orgeat and cerise, almond and orange-flower water closing in on cherry-red.1 We may on occasion be able to persuade ourselves that the flowers are intrinsic to a literary scene: the white moths that fly in the final sentences of Wuthering Heights flutter among harebells—as we saw in the rarity chapter—because harebells are referentially part of the heath. But when Emma Bovary throws “some torn scraps of paper” past the yellow window curtain of her lurching carriage and we are told that “[t]he wind caught them and scattered them, and they alighted at a distance, like white butterflies on a field of flowery red clover,” the presence of the flowers cannot be explained in terms of reference. The flowers are not part of the actual scene being described: there are no butterflies or red clover on the street. Further, unlike white butterflies—which do at least look like the scraps of paper being tossed—there is nothing in the street that is even the visual analogue of a field of flowering red clover.
Flowers occur in passages about motion in three different ways: they are in the actual scene being imagined (the purple harebells); they are analogically but not actually in the scene (there are no cherries or orange flowers in the opera lobby but the objects that are present share with them at least one of their features); or they are introduced without either a literal or an analogical counterpart (the non-actual, non-analogical red clover). These three possibilities sensitize us to the odd randomness with which flowers suddenly appear in the midst of the compositional process, so much so that we did not even notice the part played by flowers in those three passages when we first looked at them. We can look back and see this in many other passages: the grain that rotates down on the Homeric battlefield, the flowers Emma Bovary imagines catching before imagining embroidering costumes, the braided flowers Andromache weaves into the dark folding robe.
The difference between Brontë’s harebells and Flaubert’s red clover—between flowers actually present in the imagined scene and non-actual, non-analogical flowers that are nonetheless present in the imagined scene—will eventually help solve the mystery of how vegetable matter becomes a formal practice of mental composition. To make a distinction between the two may, at the same time, be misleading: we may wrongly reason that if there is a referential occasion for the flowers, they are not introduced because of their ability to assist us in a compositional practice. But the opposite is true: the harebells are present because they are so key to Brontë’s composition that she chooses to devote not just the final sentences but many sentences of the book to the heath, even allowing it to lift off the ground into the person of Heathcliff. The same is true in the Iliad: its cities, its plains, its swift running heroes are made of blossoms and vegetation.
I want to begin to contemplate passages where flowers are part of the moving picture, for then we can watch a given picture moving in our minds and see what precisely takes place. But it may be useful, before starting, to offer several speculative explanations, for then their truth can be tested as we go on to watch specific images dancing and tumbling across the mental retina. In an earlier chapter, I argued that the easily imagined flower is a work table or template on which more difficult compositions, such as faces, can be made. A moving image is even harder to construct than a face is—or, put another way, one of the reasons a face is so hard to picture is that its features are so mobile, so continually in motion. If petals are a work table on which other pictures can be made, then it is not at all surprising that when writers want us to see a moving picture, we may find flowers actually, analogically, derivationally, or quite randomly present. They can be image, fore-image, or after-image, for what we are glimpsing is less their place in the finished picture than their presence in the compositional action itself. We may catch sight of the flower a moment before the picture comes into being or a moment afterward, as it deteriorates in front of our eyes.
A second explanation is an elaboration of this first one. When we recall the specific features of the flower that make it so easy to imagine, we see that some, such as rarity, are identical or closely related to the four practices we have examined for the mental composition of motion: radiant ignition, rarity, dyadic addition and subtraction, and stretching. Rarity is the most direct match, but there are other partial matches. A blossom’s small compositional surface and high saturation of color with sudden drop-off at the petals’ edges make it conducive not just to imagining but to rapid imagining (Ashbery’s yellow flash of the tulip, for example), and rapidity makes it close to the lighting-up-then-vanishing-from-the-mind that is at play in both radiant ignition and addition-subtraction. Yet it must also be acknowledged that pieces of the flower often seem to stay stuck on the mental retina, where they are then distributed into the other images being formed.
Another puzzle concerns the flower’s relation to the practices of stretching and folding, practices more easily carried out when we are reminded of the handleability of the mental image. But do we handle flowers, even images of flowers, in the way we handle paper and cloth? Flowers, in contrast to paper and cloth, are in a continual state of their own autonomous unfolding, refolding, bending, reaching, stretching, turning—not only over the season of their coming into bloom and going out again, but in their daily cycles of waking and sleeping. In the independence of their motions, they perhaps provide a model for the sovereign motion of mental images. Sometimes, indeed, we are asked to imagine the handling of flowers, as when Emma Bovary pictures traveling with her opera singer, “gathering up the flowers his admirers threw, embroidering his costumes with her own hands.”2 But we do not ordinarily imagine folding or stretching a living blossom with our hands: we mentally recoil from the very act we so easily carry out on paper or cloth. But flowers are implicitly present in paper and cloth because both are made from vegetable matter. When we write with ink on paper, vegetable matter is being set down on top of vegetable matter.
Inks, in both the past and the present, take two forms: atramentum, or the suspension of carbon from the ashes of almonds or other vegetation; and encaustrum, or the solution of tannins from oak galls or other vegetation.3 “To make ink,” begins one of Theophilus’ medieval recipes, “cut for yourself some wood of the hawthorn—in April or May before they produce blossom or leaves.”4 Paper, like ink, comes from vegetation. Today eighty to ninety percent of paper is made from wood (fir, pine, and spruce, as well as birch, poplar, aspen, and eucalyptus); and almost all the rest comes from linen, cotton, hemp, straw, reeds, and grasses (esparto grass, Norfolk reeds, Danube reeds, kuru-kuru, ramie, elephant grass, and bamboo). Before the invention of paper, various civilizations wrote directly on vegetation: the Egyptians on papyrus, the Chinese on delicate grasses, wood fibers, and the silk from mulberry leaves.5 Because the practice of writing is, then, a laying down of flowers upon flowers, it may be regarded as an exteriorization of what the imagining mind does, and of what it was doing long before it invented this external form of itself.
But it will be helpful to turn now to concrete instances where we can watch the delicate push and sway of flowers as they set other pictures into motion.
* * *
Let us begin by simply recalling that the single most famous poem about flowers in English is a poem at almost every moment in motion. It begins with rarity, for though a person does not move easily in the mind, clouds (like shadows and reflections) do—
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
then moves to sudden radiant ignition—
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils.
The poem positions the flowers dyadically, a first picture (lake) at once vanishing to make way for a second (trees)—
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
so that the mind itself will be in motion when we get to the straightforward attribution of motion to the flowers at the end of the first verse paragraph:
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
These six lines come one after the other: there is no word, phrase, or line where our compositional powers are left unattended, and this is true again of the second verse paragraph. The lines can be read in sequence (free of my comments), for the practices Wordsworth is drawing on in this poem will be at once recognizable.
The second verse paragraph begins with radiant ignition—
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
and stretching—
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
then comes the felt roll of the eye—
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
before concluding, as at the end of the first stanza, with the direct attribution of motion—
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
If Wordsworth were asking us to understand the words of the poem, to be able to summarize to ourselves or to report to others that the poet saw dancing daffodils, there would be no miracle here, and we might, as Coleridge did, wonder what all the fuss is about. But what has taken place is not an act of comprehension but the composition of pictures moving on the mental retina, and that is indeed a miracle.
In the next twelve lines Wordsworth gradually lets the moving picture vanish from view, then stages its return once more in such a way that the motion is felt somatically throughout the entire body. We visualize, then incorporate, the moving picture so that there is a felt lift of the body. If we compare the kind of mental acts that take place in the first twelve lines (above) with those that come in the second twelve (below), it is clear that there is a difference between the poet giving the instructions and we who follow them. For the poet, the first twelve lines concern an act of perception (he is in the presence of the flowers) and only the second twelve concern his act of mental composition: he describes the miracle of being able to see the flowers dance in his imagination when he is physically away from them. For us, of course, the first twelve and the second twelve lines require the same act of imagining: we must mentally construct the moving flowers in the first twelve, and then, having mastered this feat of composition, having folded into our minds a sequence of carefully positioned instructions, we will suddenly be able to bring to bear all the strategies that simultaneously and swiftly recompose the moving picture.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee;
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
As Brontë asks us to be amazed by Heathcliff’s hallucinations while not noticing our own equally amazing hallucination of Heathcliff, as Flaubert asks us to find Emma’s imaginings remarkable while not remarking on our own ability to produce pictures of Emma, so Wordsworth permits us to be astonished by the feat of mental picturing only the second time we do it. And in one way he is right, for the second time we quickly bring the composition forward without specified procedures (as though by radiant ignition alone, “they flash upon that inward eye”), yet folded into the flash are all the practices rehearsed in lines 1–12: rarity, radiant ignition, stretching, felt eye motion, and the dyadic. In recomposition, the first composition itself acts as the template on which the recomposition gets made, and the rush, force, and ease of this second arrival make it new.
This account overstates the temporal duration of the break between the first and second acts of composition. So let us look again at how we enter that second part. Lines 13 and 14 are extraordinary for their compounding of the dyadic.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee …
Waves, we know from Homer, move in the mind dyadically: two pictures alternate—crests of water, then flat water, crests of water, then flat water. Wordsworth can count on us to have this dyad in our stock of images: we can bring it forward with the words “the waves beside them danced” and then a moment later with the words “sparkling waves,” where radiant ignition assists the dyad. But the lines are doubly dyadic because in their sweet emulation, their benign competition, the flowers themselves crest and fall in a swell of motion. And now comes a tripling of the dyad: the two pairs of dyadically breaking images are themselves dyadically seen as the mind shifts back and forth between swaying lake and swaying flowers. These lines are the last time we will picture the motion before the final flash on the inward eye. Though, for simplicity and clarity, I have described the poem as divided between the opening composition (lines 1–12) and the gradual subsiding, then reigniting, of the composition (13–24), in fact the first composition, like a breaking wave, spills over into the opening of the second part (13–14), where we let it stay (“I gazed—and gazed”) before permitting it to vanish, halfway through line 17. Only for the duration of three and a half lines (17–20) does Wordsworth permit the picture to slide off the mental retina before summoning it back.
But Wordsworth’s daffodils, although surely in motion, may seem only to confirm that the four mental practices we contemplated earlier (radiant ignition, rarity, dyadic alternations, and stretching) can be enlisted to make still things move, things like flowers as well as flying spears, sailing swans, the nod of Zeus, the wingbeats of Little Yellow, a man diving down the cellar steps, a woman reaching for a glass in a high cupboard. But I have claimed that flowers constitute a fifth and independent formal practice and are themselves enlisted into the mind’s visualization of other things in motion. So let us turn now to passages where we can verify this. It is Emily Brontë who will finally enable the articulation of this fifth formal practice, but her brilliant comrades in motion, Homer and Flaubert, lead us to her.
Here is Homer, writing of the beginning of the great movement of armies out across the Scamander plain. Is it key that spring has just come, or are there other reasons to make flowers the surface across which the movement occurs?
So tribe on tribe, pouring out of the ships and shelters,
marched across the Scamander plain and the earth shook,
tremendous thunder from under trampling men and horses
drawing into position down the Scamander meadow flats
breaking into flower—men by the thousands numberless
as the leaves and spears that flower forth in spring.6
The flowers, which at first are part of the meadow flats, a second later lift upward and inward, ceasing to be the surface across which motion occurs and becoming instead the persons who move. Both as surface across which the movement occurs and as the persons in motion, the flowers are opening, blooming, moving: “breaking into flower,” “the leaves and spears that flower forth in spring.”
Here is another passage where again flowers that have just opened appear out of nowhere to provide the floor for the mental images streaming across them.
Rank and file
streamed behind and rushed like swarms of bees
pouring out of a rocky hollow, burst on endless burst,
bunched in clusters seething over the first spring blooms.
The motion stops as Agamemnon addresses the army. When the motion resumes, the vegetation will once more have lifted from the surface across which the movement occurs to become the persons moving, for it is here that the horizontal rush of armies back to the ships is pictured as the downward rotation of grain (as “when the West Wind shakes the deep standing grain / with hurricane gusts that flatten down the stalks—”) and with that downward rotation, vegetable matter once again becomes a surface (“so the massed assembly of troops was shaken now. / They cried in alarm and charged toward the ships / and the dust went whirling up from under rushing feet”7). The grains, trampled into fine dust, make palpable their movement. Because the downward-rotating grain stalks were a metaphor, and the plain over which the soldiers’ feet now rush is literal, one might protest that it is dirt, not vegetation, that is rising into the air. But it is precisely the work of metaphor to assist the mind in the act of composing mental pictures by introducing materials not available on the literal plane. Of course, in this instance literal and figurative vegetation merge, since, quite independent of the grain metaphor, the Scamander plain is covered with grass and flowers.
One outcome of this transitional positioning of the flowers between the surface underfoot and the persons moving over the surface is that, in their continual lift and fall, the flowers seem to be neither surface nor persons moving but the motion itself. The dust of trampled grain moving upward into the air holds for a moment steadily visible the record of its own passage. It will be helpful to leave Homer for a moment and see an equivalent in Flaubert, where motion becomes a kind of floral compost that shifts from one place to another. Here8 the transfer of plant matter from ground to persons is even easier to sense because, before the motion even starts, the ground itself has already been lifted from the horizontal to the vertical plane:
Wallflowers had taken root between the bricks; and as she passed, the edge of Madame Bovary’s open parasol crumbled some of their faded flowers into yellow dust; or an overhanging branch of honeysuckle or clematis would catch in the fringe and cling for a moment to the silk.
This passage occurs in a chapter devoted to motion: Madame Bovary and Monsieur Léon walk across a meadow to the home of the wet nurse, then back again.
What marks the chapter is the continual lift and fall of flowers: they are sometimes at ground level, like the lettuce, lavender, and sweet pea in Madame Rollet’s garden, and other times underfoot, like the boggy indeterminate vegetable matter the pair walk over:
In one spot the ground was boggy from the trampling of cattle, and they had to walk on large green stones that had been laid in the mud. She kept stopping to see where to place her foot; and teetering on an unsteady stone, her arms lifted, her body bent, a hesitant look in her eye, she laughed, fearing lest she fall into the puddles.
Sometimes the vegetation floats suspended above ground level, like the reflection of the gray willows in the river or the “long fine grasses [that] bent with the current, like masses of loose green hair streaming in its limpid depth.” Sometimes they are at the height of standing persons, as is true with the wallflowers or again with the privet hedges: “These were in bloom; and blooming, too, were veronicas and wild roses and nettles and the wild blackberries that thrust out their slender sprays from the thickets.” Flaubert actually manages to lift the vegetation high in the air, not only with brushwood, walnut, and elm trees, but by more extraordinary means: “[The house] was low, roofed with brown tiles, and from the attic window hung a string of onions.” Vegetation is the surface on which motion takes place (“Here and there on the tip of a reed or on a water-lily pad a spidery-legged insect was poised or crawling”) or is itself in motion (the long fine grasses bending in the stream, the slender thrusting sprays of roses and blackberries, the yellow spill of crumbling wallflowers), or is the tissue through which dyadic pictures are seen (as when Emma and Léon look through holes in the blooming privet hedge and see a succession of pictures). The wet meadow in Flaubert, like the Scamander plain in Homer and the moors in Brontë, is less a floor across which motion occurs than the compositional matter out of which motion gets made.
Homer often lifts or tilts the vegetative floor up into the air. The supple surface of the Scamander plain enters our picture not just of warlike motion but of the motion of playing, “drifting,” “hanging back” from the lines. Achilles, we are told, lies in his ship,
while his men sported along the surf, marking time,
hurling the discus, throwing spears and testing bows.
And the horses, each beside its chariot, champing clover
and parsley from the marshes, waited, pawing idly.9
The clover and parsley rise not by the intervention of a metaphor but by the literal ingesting upward into the horse’s body, their motions of pawing and champing made vivid by the silky material common to both. The floral floor also tilts forward into a vertical surface for the soldiers’ shelters. “Cities of grass” Seamus Heaney calls the dwellings in the Iliad.10 Our contemplation of the high grassy wall and roof prepares us for the mental action of stretching or tearing or “spreading” the surface in a passage where we must picture a gate opening.
Now, at last, [Priam and his immortal escort] approached royal Achilles’ shelter,
the tall, imposing lodge the Myrmidons built their king,
hewing planks of pine, and roofed it high with thatch,
gathering thick shaggy reeds from the meadow banks,
and round it built their king a spacious courtyard
fenced with close-set stakes. A single pine beam
held the gates, and it took three men to ram it home,
three to shoot the immense bolt back and spread the doors—
three average men. Achilles alone could ram it home himself.
But the god of luck now spread the gates for the old man,
drove in the glinting gifts for Peleus’ swift son.11
We mentally rehearse the “hands-on” instruction; then, effortlessly, without the intervention of hands, the huge vegetable construction spreads apart, opening as easily as the dainty tears in the privet hedge of Emma and Léon.
A steady redistribution of composted flowers takes place, a steady rotation between horizontal and vertical axes. The floor and wall of our imaginings, the stuff out of which pictures get made, the flowers are themselves in motion: they bloom; they spread; they sway, reach and fold, bend and close, tilt, thrust, tremble, fall, and blow away. Because they move in the mind so easily, we are often asked to picture their motions as a substitute for other motions glancingly asserted to be going on around them. Or we are asked to picture their motion as a rehearsal for motions more difficult to picture which, a moment later, we are called upon to compose. On rare occasions, we are instructed to picture the more difficult motion first, and then to review it across the surface of a flower.
The ease of imagining floral motion cannot be attributed to its happening in perceivable time in a way that might distinguish it from human motion. When the men pour out on the Scamander plain like “leaves and spears that flower forth in spring,” the visible blossoming cannot function as a speeded-up analogue for the spreading out of the armies. Even the comparatively quick opening of a poppy takes many slow minutes or hours, as long as the time it takes for men to fan out over a plain. Events in a plant may act as a quick digest of slow actions—such as those involved in a human being growing up—but not because a tree in the real world accomplishes this more quickly than a human being does. When Thetis several times tells us,
Zeus also gave me a son to bear and breed,
the splendor of heroes, and he shot up like a young branch,
like a fine tree I reared him—the orchard’s crowning glory,12
the lines help us picture his growing up and out—a rapid stretching and elongation—but not because trees grow up faster than human beings do. Some trees grow faster than boys; other trees take longer than human boys to reach adulthood. The growth of both plants and human beings is slower than perceptible motion: if, therefore, we can picture the changing surface of a tree, it is because its nature makes it pliant, susceptible to our own mental revisions. A twenty-year process such as the growth of a child might well be compared to a several-second event like the unfolding of a cloth or the unfurling of a sail; here we might reasonably suppose that what makes the cloth event easier to picture than the child’s growth is that, in the actual physical world, it takes place within the frame of seconds. But this explanation is not available with plants and trees. Here is another instance in the Iliad where the growth and fall of a person take place inside the supple tissue of a plant:
There he lay
like an olive slip a farmer rears to strength
on a lonely hilltop, drenching it down with water,
a fine young stripling tree, and the winds stir it softly,
rustling from every side, and it bursts with silver shoots—
then suddenly out of nowhere a wind in gale force comes storming,
rips it out of its trench, stretches it out on the earth—
so Panthous’ stripling son lay sprawled in death.13
Whether the young olive-slip-turned-stripling is several months or several years old, it is still outside the compass of perceptible time; yet by being vegetable, it is brought within the radius of our compositional powers, especially if assisted by rarity (“the winds stir it softly, / rustling from every side”), radiant ignition (“it bursts with silver shoots”), and stretching (“stretches it out on the earth— / so Panthous’ stripling son lay sprawled in death”).* So the motions of men and horses are set in flowers; or the flowers themselves open, bend, or fold in a way that lets us limber up our minds for making persons and other nonfloral things move moments later.
I turn now to one final instance where the floral surface is rotated upright to be the vertical work table for composable motion, and that is the shield of Achilles. We find ourselves, once again, in a situation where a poet asks us to stop and stand amazed before an act of picture-making, and we may rightly protest that we have been performing equally astonishing acts of picture-making over the course of thousands of lines of poetry for eighteen books. In part, we stand amazed because suddenly what is pictured on the shield is not the war but the civilization and the laws for the sake of which the war takes place. A dispute is being settled in court, a marriage is taking place: this, then, is the world of social contract.14 Herodotus tells us what the Iliad tells us: that the Trojan War took place because Paris abducted Helen. But women, according to Herodotus, were often abducted from one people by another people; he faults the Greeks for their preposterous overreaction.15 What made the Trojan War remarkable was not (if we may trust Herodotus’ account and his own dismay) that Helen was abducted but that the Greeks thought this was an event worth going to war over. Book 18 of the Iliad pictures the civil society, the rule of law that now includes as one of its provisions the prohibition on the abduction of women by foreign populations.
This civil society is imagined as a pleasure-filled and pleasure-giving rhapsody of moving pictures. Astonishing in all its details, the description of Hephaestus’ crafting of the shield goes on for 150 lines,16 turning our attention now to one amazing aspect of his genius, now to another, until we arrive at the final paragraph, where Homer pulls out all the stops—now it is “all” his art that is enlisted in the final picture:
And the crippled Smith brought all his art to bear
on a dancing circle.…
Here young boys and girls … danced and danced,
linking their arms, gripping each other’s wrists.
For eighteen lines we watch the swirling motion of beautiful young girls and boys, as they “run in rings on their skilled feet, / nimbly.” How can we see it? Present in the lines, as one might expect, is the “hands-on!” instruction: we whirl the mental image as the potter “spins his wheel / palming it smoothly, giving it practice twirls.” Present also is the “it’s only cloth!” instruction: “And the girls wore robes of linen light and flowing, / the boys wore finespun tunics rubbed with a gloss of oil.” And of course there are flowers: “the girls were crowned with a bloom of fresh garlands.” But if we can see these children dance—dance and dance for eighteen lines—it is also because this climactic moment of image-making has come after five verse paragraphs where Homer has converted the entire vertical surface of the shield (with its tissue of spun metals, three-ply at the edges, five layers at the center) into a floral compost where vegetable matter continually rises and falls.
Press your mind into the surface of this shield, Homer first instructs us. It is a “fallow field,” already tilled twice up and down its full surface, all and every part; now “crews of ploughmen / wheel[] their teams” systematically up and down the surface for a third time, stopping at the end of each line to receive honey and wine before turning back to begin the next line, “and the earth churned black behind them, like earth churning / solid gold as it was—that was the wonder of Hephaestus’ work.” Gorgeous forged metal becomes over the course of this verse paragraph a churned flan of vegetable matter and soil, the compositional surface for what comes in the next four paragraphs—plants, plants in motion, moving on their own, moving in human hands, moving to cover the full surface, like a poem, line by line: “Some stalks fell in line with the reapers, row on row.” On the surface of the mental retina, as on the shield, an oak spreads, glistening barley falls through the air, “climbing vines sho[o]t up on silver vine-poles,” scythes swing, reeds sway, a meadow materializes, fruit is picked; strings are plucked, and a “fine voice rising and falling low” sings. Gold, silver, tin, and blue enamel change before our eyes into moist vegetation: “grapes in gold, ripening deep purple.” The mind dives into the surface of the shield, resurfaces, dives in again, moving amid this spun fabric of fruit, metal, grain, meadow grass, filling one’s hands, one’s arms, one’s eyes, one’s heart.
It is as though not the metal of the shield but whatever resistant stuff the brain is made of must be made extraordinarily supple for what will come in the final climax, the dance of the lustrous children in their glistening tunics and flowers. How will Homer end this? What will the climax be, how can there be more and more, once they link arms, cross hands, run and dance,
and now they would run in rows,
in rows crisscrossing rows—rapturous dancing.
For the picture must end, and at last it comes:
A breathless crowd stood round them struck with joy
and through them a pair of tumblers dashed and sprang,
whirling in leaping handsprings, leading out the dance.
When the Iliad was recited aloud to an assembly of people, what sounds did they make when they heard these lines? Did they gasp? Did some cry? For if the acrobats tumble through the mind, their arrival is so forceful that it throws one’s head back or forward. The instruction does not always work. Sometimes one feels like a person on a hilltop, waiting for a comet that has been promised and promised; you may even hear others cry out, Here it comes! Yet you cannot make it out yourself, though you feel the pleasure of being in its presence when it is reported to be happening. That is what it is like if one hears and understands the instruction but does not oneself actually carry it out. But when the instruction works, when the acrobats suddenly handspring onto the floor of one’s mind, that is a miracle, the sudden entry into the interior of their highly etched presence. The murmured phrases we might invent or borrow—“my heart leaps up,” “and then my heart with pleasure fills”—seem broken and inadequate to the ecstatic recognition, the conviction that this ability to have images move in the mind, to move across an assembly of minds, to tumble and handspring across time through mind after mind, really is the heart of civil society.
To have us understand that an act of tumbling takes place is not what the lines aspire to. They aspire to turn our minds into the floor of its happening. Horizontal and vertical lift and fall through one another as the ground becomes upright shield and the upright shield becomes the floral ground upturned, down-turned, three times overturned, laced with glistening sprays of barley arcing through the air and vines shooting upward on silver poles until the very membrane of the mind, like a moist linen cloth stretched taut, like a silken trampoline, acquires the pliancy and suppleness that enable it to receive the springing acrobats, Homer’s figure of civic joy.
* * *
We have seen that flowers tilt between the horizontal and vertical planes, and we have seen that flowers alternate between being the surface over which moving objects pass and being themselves the objects in motion. Both of these suggest that mental motion is somehow assisted by mystifying or destabilizing the relation between figure and ground, and we shall return to this destabilization in Part Three. But one other key feature of flowers—their association with the suppositional—explains how flowers, which seem like the subject matter of imagining rather than part of the compositional process, in fact constitute a formal practice. Floral supposition finds its most expert practitioner in Emily Brontë.
In looking at the Iliad’s acrobats, we made an insistent distinction between comprehending an instruction and mentally carrying it out, between comprehending what is supposed to happen and having it happen. But this stark either-or division understates the intricate discriminations the imagining mind carries out when what can be fully imagined may have riding above it what can only be half imagined, and in turn what can be half imagined will have floating above it what can be one-fourth or one-seventh imagined, so that a latticework or series of moving scrims sail into and out of the mind’s eye, often bringing simultaneously into one another’s company the imaginable, the barely imaginable, and the almost unimaginable. Sometimes, to put the matter more simply, we are asked to picture something; other times we are asked to picture picturing something; and, comic as it sounds, sometimes we are even asked to picture (ourselves or a fictional person) picturing picturing something. I refer to this as suppositional imagining because rather than being instructed to imagine, we are instructed to suppose that we are imagining something. And flowers are bound up with these precise discriminations.
Why is that? What is the exact relation of flowers to the mental act of supposition? Three explanations seem possible, each encountered before but each now visible in a new light. One is that the flower is the floor beneath other images: wholly imaginable, it supports layers of partially imaginable motion occurring on top of it. It is the most richly worked robe at the bottom of Hecuba’s linen closet (“like a star it glistened”); it is not just the first image in a stack of images (lending its excess vivacity to those diminished images above) but the work table on which the others get made. It is for this reason that we may say with Rilke that the petal is the mental retina.
A second explanation is that the flower is not the surface for other images but the material out of which they get made. This is why we often catch floral compost switching from one location in a moving picture to another, as when the yellow wallflowers crumble and become part of Emma Bovary’s forward motion, or when the orange blossoms in the opera soprano’s hair become a moving streak that (as she is carried onstage) is rapidly drawn out like a smear of paint until its pale inflection of orange becomes pure white, or when the blossoms breaking into flower on the Scamander plain lift upward to become the men rushing across the plain. Flowers are connected to suppositional imagining because they are less the picture than the thing that is about to become, or was just a moment ago, the picture. They are latency or potency. Thus we often glimpse them just out of the corner of our eyes. If we notice flowers in a mental picture and also notice they are not thematically justified, we may say they are mere ornament. But their being present without thematic justification should alert us not to their superfluity and superficiality but to the opposite, to the deep requirement for their presence, their subtending of the rest of the composition.
A third explanation relies on the extended account I gave in chapter 4 of the way flowers are a rehearsal for perception: plants are not percipient but almost percipient, not quite percipient, and hence are kindred to the mimesis of percipience that takes place in imagining. But just as the imagination only pretends to perceive, sometimes it only pretends to pretend. In other words, just as imagining is not-perceiving or only-almost-perceiving or not-quite-perceiving, so the imagination, with its latticework of incompletely pictured elements, has within it both the actually imagined and the only-almost-imagined, the not-quite-imagined, and the not-yet-imagined. If the imaginary is the counterfactual, then we must say that what is only suppositionally or subjunctively imagined (almost-imagined, not-quite-imagined) is the counterfactual’s counterfactual. It magnifies its own work through negation and abstention. This is the way the imagination reflects on itself and becomes self-knowing. Bound up with blossoms, this practice of meta-imaging or floral supposition may be full of self-delight (as in Rilke) but is also, in what it requires of us, athletic, stern.
Let us turn, then, to Nelly and young Cathy rambling—or, as we shall see, not-quite-rambling—on the grounds of Thrush-cross Grange in chapter 22 of Wuthering Heights, our counterpart to the grassy meadow that Emma and Léon walk through in Madame Bovary and to the grassy Scamander plain of the Iliad. The chapter is seven pages long. It consists of one walk and two conversations: in one, Nelly and Cathy talk about the mortality of Cathy’s father and of Nelly herself; in the other, Heathcliff, who intercepts our walkers, attempts to coerce Cathy to come to Wuthering Heights to visit his dying son. The two conversations compete with each other, for Heathcliff’s instructions directly oppose the instructions of Cathy’s adored father, who has prohibited her from going to the Heights. His fragility, the subject of the first conversation, should make Cathy even more obedient than usual, but in the next-to-last sentence of the chapter, Nelly gives us a still picture that tells us Heathcliff is the winner: “the next day beheld me on the road to Wuthering Heights, by the side of my wilful young mistress’s pony.”
Other than the two competing conversations, almost all the sentences in this brief chapter are instructions to us for picturing Nelly and Cathy on their walk. Practices such as radiant ignition and dyadic subtraction of course turn up here, as do two aspects of flowers-as-a-formal-practice. As in Homer and Flaubert, the motion of vegetation substitutes for the motion of the walkers: we picture blossoms in motion and somehow come to have the sense that we have seen people moving. Again as in Homer and Flaubert, the floral axis rotates from the horizontal to the vertical as flowers at foot level shift to high banks at eye level, then move overhead to a high wall, or farther overhead to the swaying branches of trees. Since Cathy is pictured against the flowers at each height, she moves (by dyadic addition and subtraction) not laterally across the grassy floor but vertically up and down in the blossoming air.
But we also discover here what we could not easily have discovered before: the way the picturable motion of the vegetation subtends otherwise unpicturable or barely picturable forms of motion. Presently occurring motions take place in the presence of not-presently-occurring motions. They may be not-presently-occurring because they are in the past, or in the future, or in the subjunctive, or because they are prefaced by a “not.” We may gather them all under the rubric of “suppositional motion,” because in each case we are being instructed to suppose imagining the motion rather than actually to imagine it. The sense of sternness and severity we have in reading Brontë comes from the fact that each sentence grammatically predicts the level of acuity we can actually achieve in imagining. Brontë gives precise calibrations for the levels of vivacity to be aspired to when we compose motions by her exacting grammatical registration.
We move through the story at a brisk pace, and it is almost painful to move through it line by line, especially since the flashes, shadows, and points of motion must—in this slow-motion account—be held steadily present to the mind in a way that compounds the labor of composition. But the chapter is brief; this will not take long. The day’s motion begins this way:
“I requested my young lady to forego her ramble because I was certain of showers. She refused.”17
Brontë does not, in Nelly’s report, tell us to imagine Nelly and Cathy rambling as she might have with the sentence, “Despite the certainty of showers, my young lady and I went on a ramble,” which on some level is where we arrive by the end of the second sentence. Nor does she give us a simple suppositional, as she would have if she had merely used the mandatory subjunctive (“I requested my young lady to ramble”) or the negative (“We did not ramble”), either of which would provide a light scrim of “rambling” over the more vivid motions actually asserted to be taking place. Instead, the motion is doubly suppositional: both the mandatory subjunctive and the negative are used (“I requested my young lady to forego her ramble”). The scrim of rambling is raised by one degree of heightened vivacity with the second sentence (“She refused.”), which tells us that Nelly and Cathy, at Cathy’s insistence, are indeed setting out on a walk; it is vivified only one degree because it is phrased as a negation of a negative mandatory subjunctive. Brontë might have instead written, “But she insisted,” were she not calibrating her degrees of counterfactual with such breathtaking exactitude.
Once Cathy and Nelly begin what should be their ramble, rambling does not quite occur, because Cathy is weighed down with worry about the mortality of her father and we receive the suppositional negation:
She went sadly on; there was no running or bounding now …
The “no” preceding running and bounding does not erase the actions: we cannot be asked to not-picture running and bounding; instead, these motions faintly glance across the mind. This sentence continues with yet another instance of suppositional motion, this time by a subjunctive—
though the chill wind might well have tempted her to a race.18
—which is actually a double subjunctive, with the simple counterfactual (the wind might well have made her race) and mandatory subjunctive (the wind tempted her to a race) combined (“the chill wind might well have tempted her to a race”).
Here follows Nelly’s roll of the eye, which I mentioned earlier: “from the side of my eye, I could detect her raising a hand, brushing something off her cheek,” where an actual bodily motion that can be enacted by the reader or listener substitutes for more difficult feats of imagining. This is followed by a second roll of the eye—“I gazed round for a means of diverting her thoughts.”
Now vegetation appears, vegetation that either is or is close to being in motion. The sentence containing the plants opens with the ground itself starting to move, as we stretch the compositional surface upward—
On one side of the road rose a high, rough bank,
and the picture becomes increasingly unstable:
where hazels and stunted oaks, with their roots half exposed, held uncertain tenure: the soil was too loose for the latter,
and now we mentally carry out a downward rotation of the oaks—
and strong winds had blown some nearly horizontal.
The motion is necessitated not by the wind (that happened in the past) but by the revision we must make in the composition itself; for most imaginers will first place the trees upright and then later will have to correct the image by rotating them down.
Now that plants are in motion, Brontë asks us to picture persons in motion, but again only suppositionally, for rather than picturing Cathy doing something in the present, we picture Nelly remembering Cathy in action in an earlier season. The picture is not as faint as it would be in the subjunctive, in a “not” clause, or in the future, but it does not have the vivacity of our bank stretching upward and our oaks turning downward.
In summer, Miss Catherine delighted to climb among these trunks—
and now, as we shift back to the vegetation, both plants and persons move in the mind—
and sit in the branches, swinging twenty feet above the ground …
We must interrupt here to note that at the start of this sentence, we lift Cathy’s image up into the trees with the assistance of a species of radiant ignition (“Miss Catherine delighted to climb”), and as the sentence continues Brontë uses radiant ignition to keep her up there:
and I, pleased with her agility and her light, childish heart, still considered it proper to scold every time I caught her at such an elevation …19
And now as the sentence closes, we mentally bring her down to the ground again, but only in the faintest scrim possible, since the descent, already embedded with historical supposition, occurs as a negation:
but so that she knew there was no necessity for descending.
Next we recompose, revivify, the picture of persons and plants moving that we made a moment ago—
From dinner to tea she would lie in her breeze-rocked cradle, doing nothing except singing old songs—my nursery lore—to herself, or watching the birds, joint tenants …
We now stretch the image of the birds as they strain forward to their young, and the motion of the infant birds’ flying occurs only as a much lighter scrim than the parental stretches, since flying is safely held within the mandatory subjunctive—
feed and entice their young ones to fly …
The sentence closes with a description of Cathy’s mental state and, simultaneously, of the mental state of suppositional imagining that we ourselves are in, which with its conflation of vivid motions and faint scrims is not straightforward picturing but something between comprehending and imagining:
or nestling with closed lids, half thinking, half dreaming, happier than words can express.
During these two long sentences, the whole field of composition has been moving up and down: the branches, our vertical ground, sway continually. Within that moving floral surface small stretches and foldings occur (birds strain forward, eyelids close downward), and over them is superimposed a scrim of a radiant young girl climbing, not-yet-descending, and a still lighter scrim of almost-flying baby birds. It is not that the motion of descending and flying do not take place on the mental retina. They do. But we imagine imagining these motions: they skirt across the mind like the shadow of a wispy cloud.
A new sequence of sentences begins. Brontë moves back to present time, and again a flower appears:
“Look, Miss!” I exclaimed, pointing to a nook under the roots of one twisted tree. “Winter is not here yet. There’s a little flower, up yonder, the last bud from the multitude of blue-bells that clouded those turf steps in July with a lilac mist.”
It would be almost impossible to get the saturated blue of bluebells to cover the entire mental retina, but by beginning with intense localization, one tight spot (a bud) of saturated blue, then spreading and thinning it out to a cloud of lilac mist in an earlier season, we carry the color to a larger, vertically positioned area. The motion of the compositional act is what we see: we mentally spread the color, magnify its area, thin out its hue (which nevertheless retains a floral name, lilac), and as we do so the flower itself, like the fast-growing filial orchard trees in the Iliad, multiplies and spreads before our eyes.
Now comes propositional motion:
“Will you clamber up, and pluck it to show to papa?”
The motions of clambering up, plucking, and showing remain propositional only, like a pencil sketch on a transparent veil skirting rapidly through the mind; and they are displaced by the actual—that is, fully imaginable—motion of the flower itself:
Cathy stared a long time at the lonely blossom trembling in its earthly shelter, and replied, at length—
“No I’ll not touch it—
Persons stay still: Cathy stares a long time and refuses to carry out the acts of reaching and touching. Only the flower moves: the lonely blossom trembles.
Now Brontë bestows motion on persons, but again only suppositionally, for Nelly invites Cathy to run. The moving picture is exquisite—Nelly and Cathy running hand-in-hand across the meadow—but as light as possible, since it takes place in the mandatory subjunctive. Even this level of vivacity is achieved by prefacing the running motion with the assertion that Cathy and the trembling flower are made of the same dematerialized tissue:
but it looks melancholy, does it not Ellen?”
“Yes,” I observed, “about as starved and sackless as you—your cheeks are bloodless; let us take hold of hands and run. You’re so low, I dare say I shall keep up with you.”
If Cathy were to accept Nelly’s invitation, we would work to imagine with conviction what we at this point only have to suppose imagining. But Cathy declines.
“No,” she repeated …
Then suddenly, for a split second, Cathy has motion directly attributed to her, which we successfully picture because of the rehearsal motions we have just been carrying out:
and continued sauntering on,
but this quickly shifts back to a compositional mix we know well by now, stationary persons and moving vegetation:
pausing, at intervals, to muse over a bit of moss, or a tuft of blanched grass, or a fungus spreading its bright orange among the heaps of brown foliage; and, ever and anon, her hand was lifted to her averted face.
Like the trembling bluebell whose color spreads upward into a lilac mist, the bright orange spreads and our own act of mentally stretching its color assists us a split second later in tilting Cathy’s arm upward. Also—as was true in the bluebell sentence where Nelly points and exclaims “Look, Miss!”—the major motions attributed to persons entail actions of the hand or eye.
There follows a full page of conversation about the mortality of Cathy’s father, before we again return to the project of making moving pictures. The movement of the words provides the transition back to the moving pictures:
As we talked, we neared a door that opened on the road …
Now we are about to make Cathy’s image lift into the air, and just as moving her up into the tree and keeping her there required two separate acts of radiant ignition, so here the same mental practice is enlisted:
and my young lady, lightening into sunshine again, climbed up, and seated herself on the top of the wall …
Here three motions take place. We stretch the image of Cathy; vague points expand into small pools of color (rose hips blooming scarlet); then other red pools are subtracted from lower branches—and into the midst of this vivid commotion, birds fly on a scrim of supposition:
reaching over to gather some hips that bloomed scarlet on the summit branches of the wild rose trees, shadowing the highway side; the lower fruit had disappeared, but only birds could touch the upper, except from Cathy’s present station.
Once more we stretch the image of Cathy—“In stretching to pull them, her hat fell off”—and perform a subtraction: Cathy with hat; Cathy without hat. At this point two extremely active motions, “scrambling down” the wall and falling off it, enter, the first as a proposal and the second as a counterfactual embedded within the mandatory subjunctive. We are instructed to suppose making the image of Cathy scramble down, then (returning her to her place on the wall) suppose making her image fall. But what the end of the sentence directs us actually to imagine is instead only her straightforward subtraction: “… and as the door was locked, she proposed scrambling down to recover it. I bid her be cautious lest she got a fall, and she nimbly disappeared.”20
We know that, left to themselves, mental pictures disintegrate, vanish, disappear. It is part of Brontë’s endless brilliance that she gets us to watch them as they disappear and bids them a generous farewell—as Shakespeare does with Ariel—by attributing their disappearance to their nimbleness: “she nimbly disappeared.”
The next sentence again requires us to mix a suppositional negation (the designation of a movement by Cathy that does not occur) with an actual vegetable motion: “But the return was no such easy matter; the stones were smooth and neatly cemented, and the rosebushes and the blackberry stragglers could yield no assistance in re-ascending.” Like the bluebell swelling into a lilac mist, the orange fungus stretching, the oak and hazel trees rising and rotating, the tree branches swaying, the rose hips blooming scarlet, here blackberry and roses stretch and straggle.
Catherine issues an invitation to motion (“Ellen, you’ll have to fetch the key”), followed by a negation (“I can’t scale the ramparts on this side!”). Heathcliff arrives. He begins a conversation in which he coaxes and coerces Cathy to come to the Heights the following day. Nelly on the other side of the wall is helpless to assist Cathy until at last the lock in the door gives way. Now two forms of stretching occur: “spreading my umbrella, I drew my charge underneath.” The elasticity of the scene is again assisted by vegetation: “for the rain began to drive through the moaning branches of the trees.” And now comes the final stretch, as we mentally elongate forward the two figures of our heroines: “We stretched toward home.”
* * *
Throughout Brontë’s brief chapter, the compositional surface is floral, vertical, and in motion. It is as though the mental retina has four episodes: one green, one lavender-blue, one orange, one scarlet. First, a vertical mat of green hazel and oak branches, rotating up and down, sways and swings in the air, rocking the fragile cargo of images (a singing girl and some birds) riding on top of them. Then a bluebell spreads upward (“up yonder”; “Will you clamber up”) along turf steps into a lilac mist; and on top of this lavender surface the faint outline of a blue petal-like child clambers up and down. Then bright orange fungus spreads over high heaps of brown foliage, supporting on its double work table the motion of a hand that lifts and falls. Then rose hips bloom scarlet and, along with blackberry vines, stretch and straggle over a high wall onto which we lift and perch the image of a vanishing girl. The vegetable motion comes equally from the motion of the plants and the mental motion of composition, as when we mentally spread a color (lilac, orange, scarlet) or stretch a bank upward or rotate a tree trunk downward (the wind pushed the trees down in the past; we push them down in the present, not to execute the wind’s past action, but to revise the erroneous vertical position we had assigned it a split second earlier when first told of the trees). We carry out Brontë’s instructions, and she herself is designing her sentences to match, to carry out, the images in her head: when she tells us that Cathy is lost between thought and dream, more happy “than words can express,” she might have written, “than words can carry out.”
There are a small number of nonflower motions that have the same degree of actuality as the flower motions have—Cathy’s climbing up the wall by radiant ignition, her dyadic disappearance over the wall, her elongation and Nelly’s as they stretch toward home. But most of the nonfloral motions are ones we only suppositionally imagine. Rambling, running, bounding, racing, flying, clambering up, scampering down, scaling the ramparts are all vigorous words of action; yet each, specified to be counterfactual or hypothetical, comes before the mind as though carried on the delicate sweep of an angel’s wing, as though set in motion by currents of air from the vegetable stir below.
What precisely is the nature of the instruction that is being given in floral supposition? If we can only faintly see Nelly and Cathy racing hand in hand, why not simply straightforwardly tell us to picture them running hand in hand, and let us carry out the instruction as faintly as need be? Why make the grammar and verb tense anticipate and match the low level of vivacity that we can carry out? What is gained by grammatical prediction? The answer, I think, is that Brontë, along with other extraordinary writers, has an unfailingly precise sense of the limits of the compositional powers of the human mind, and by crafting her instructions to match, with strict care, the pictures we can actually make, she achieves, through our trust, the power to carry us beyond them. How could a painter craft without knowing the powers and limitations of the paint? How could a sculptor not know the attributes of the material to be worked? How could Mozart compose for a musical instrument without knowing what sounds that instrument made? Why should it seem odd that literary composition takes into account the nature of the instrument, in this case the imagining mind, on which it will be played: Minuet for the Imaging Mind; Duet for the Mind That Can Do Radiant Ignition Plus Stretching; Sonata in G for a Floral Imaginer. Brontë makes the syntax of each precisely differentiate what can be directly pictured (a blossom trembling, lichen spreading, rose hips blooming scarlet, an umbrella opening) from what can only be glimpsed on the mental retina (scrambling down, clambering up, racing hand in hand), so that we shall follow her smallest direction with exacting precision, fly with her, keep pace with her, race with her hand in hand.
* * *
So our small patient cardinal, easy to picture in her own body, and in the repertoire of head tilts and tail flirtations close to her body, but hard to picture in flight, which I can, even now, only imagine imagining, has correctly guided us all along. I have neglected to mention that in late winter, when the garden was full of snow and of the moving shadows of tall brown stalks of astilbe and hollyhock, a brilliant cherry-red bird began to show up in the garden. Although for many weeks he could not persuade Tray to leave, eventually he did so, though they are still in the lilacs each dawn, and each dusk, when it is too dark for other birds to fly or even to see. Each day they fly side by side through a circuit of gardens: I have seen them skate across the grass and flowers at Elizabeth Snow’s garden and I have found the pair among the tall cosmos and dahlias in the Harbisons’ garden; and on several summer evenings I saw them, on their way to my house, arcing low across the shady ground at John Sweeney’s where glowing white impatiens and a stone statue of the Virgin light up the air. They slide along a bright ribbon that circles back on itself and returns, cuts through my world, each dawn, each dusk. At night and until the moment before the light breaks, there are no decipherable colors in the garden, even in the early weeks of summer when lustrous poppies, irises, peonies, and the first sweet pea bloom. Then again in the evening come seven minutes when the full spectrum, no matter how dazzling, just disappears. These are the minutes of the opening and close of day when the pair sit in the lilacs, and for many months now the first color of day has emerged across their small bodies—one uniform red, as though lit from within; the other tawny, dusky, and at last with more and more light, apricot, then peach, then daylily pink. Across these same small surfaces, the daylight each night disappears.