Notes
1. On Vivacity
1. Jean-Paul Sartre gives an extended account of the imagined image in “The Imaginary Life,” in The Psychology of Imagination (New York, 1991), 177–212. My thanks to Jack Davis, who long ago invited me to daydream a “place” and then compare it to the place in which I was daydreaming.
2. John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” in John Keats: Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 281.
3. Fifteen months after completing this chapter, I found that the same observation has been made by the nineteenth-century Russian aesthetician N. G. Chernishevsky, who, in Life and Aesthetics (1853), wrote, “All other arts, like live reality, act directly on our senses; poetry acts on the imagination.” Chernishevsky, however, assumed that the imagination, in the act of reading, accomplishes only the impoverished image-making of daydreaming: “It is evident … that the images of poetry are weak, anemic, indefinite, as compared with the corresponding images in life,” and he concluded that the beauty of life is much greater than the beauty of art, whose strength resides in “its generalities” (conclusion to Life and Aesthetics, reprinted in Documents of Modern Literary Realism, ed. George J. Becker [Princeton, 1962], 48, 49, 61).
4. William Wordsworth, “Gold and Silver Fishes in a Vase,” in Wordsworth: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson and Ernest de Selincourt (London, 1936), 412.
5. For a review of the research in cognitive psychology suggesting that in making mental images we draw on the very neural mechanisms that we use in perceiving, see Stephen M. Kosslyn, Image and Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 295, 301, 325.
The questions I try to answer in this book are only part of the overall mystery of how the imagination works. For a magisterial study of the philosophic literature on the imagination, from Plato to Wittgenstein, see Eva T. H. Brann, The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance (Boston, 1991). Brann worries about the incompleteness of the philosophic portrait we have so far produced; and worries as well about contemporary attempts to ignore or even “dismantle [the imagination] as a category” (10). At the same time, her study provides rich evidence of the complex attempts to come to terms with it over many centuries.
6. Accounts of mental picture-making are often circular: they answer the question of how pictures get produced in the mind by reasserting that pictures do get produced in the mind. (“What is the ‘ut’ in ‘ut pictura poesis’?” asks Allen Grossman of both Horace and Ludwig Wittgenstein [personal conversation, August 1992].) My argument—that the imagination produces a mimesis of sensation by miming the deep structure that brings the sensation about—may sound equally circular. But if we measure the strength of the argument by its ability to produce practical outcomes, then we shall see that it at least partially succeeds. That is, if I can identify steps that, when followed, enable daydreamers to see the faces of their friends more clearly, then I shall take it that the account has validity.
2. On Solidity
1. Aristotle, On the Soul (De Anima), trans. J. A. Smith, 3.8.431A, in Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes. Revised Oxford Translation (Princeton, 1984), 1:687.
2. John Ashbery, “Tapestry,” in As We Know (New York, 1979), 90.
3. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser (New York, 1959), 1:151. This and all subsequent references are to chapter 4, “The Idea of Solidity.”
4. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York, 1982), 1:10–11.
5. J. J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston, 1966), 203, 204.
6. Ibid., 214.
7. Locke, Miscellaneous Papers, cited in Locke, op. cit., 155–56 n. 4.
8. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, 3:480, 481.
9. Ibid., 1:416, 417.
10. Hayao Miyazaki, Castle of Cagliostro, trans. Carl Macec (Tokyo, 1980), film.
11. Thomas Hardy, “The Sun on the Bookcase (Student’s Love-Song: 1870),” in Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson (New York, 1982), 311.
12. Hardy, “The Going,” in Complete Poems, 338.
13. Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (New York, 1985), 160.
14. Ibid., 208.
15. J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (New York, 1959), 28–31, 53, 54.
16. Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago, 1958), 25. Hagstrum does not himself single out the construction process as important to the poem’s vividness and explicitly faults Gotthold Lessing for his emphasis on the construction process in the account of the making of Achilles’ shield (19). Nevertheless, the reappearance of instances of construction in the very passages Hagstrum has chosen to illustrate enargeia, in combination with instances such as those in Huysmans, makes this conclusion inescapable. (I follow Hagstrum’s spelling here for enargeia, a term he distinguishes from energeia.)
17. Gibson, Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, 204.
18. Ibid., 215.
19. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism, ed. Richard J. Dunn (New York, 1971), 14.
20. In Charles Bovary’s first visit to Les Bertaux, the stone walls in the farm kitchen are covered with metal utensils, which in turn reflect the play of “glimmering” light from the hearth fire and the breaking of dawn through the window. In his return visits, the light “quiver[s]” across the ceiling and “pattern[s]” the stone floor over whose surface there also “drift[s]” a thin film of dust and in whose fireplace a film of blue ash is lit by morning light coming down the chimney. Ceiling and floor thus acquire the solidity of the walls. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Francis Steegmuller (New York, 1991), 16, 17, 25.
Though in invoking Proust, Hardy, Brontë, and Flaubert I am staying within one tradition, the same phenomenology is at work elsewhere. Robert Pinsky observes that Dante’s Inferno may be “a supreme example of one kind of surface passing over another, one made more solid or opaque by the sliding.” Pinsky calls attention to the many passages in Cantos 12 and 6 of Inferno and Canto 21 of Purgatorio in which the ability of a physical body to displace material stones or ground is contrasted with the inability of a shade to do so. “Hell itself (and its inhabitants) is one great scrim passing over a more solid reality. Or the reverse, apparent material reality is really a scrim of transparent illusion passing over the more solid moral reality underneath.” Robert Pinsky, personal correspondence, 22 November 1994.
21. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 156, 157.
22. Alexander Campbell Fraser drawing on Locke’s Third Letter to Stillingfleet in Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 156 n. 2.
23. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 14.
24. Hardy, Tess, 192.
25. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, 1:416.
26. Huysmans, Against Nature, 23.
27. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 65.
28. Hardy, Tess, 312.
3. The Place of Instruction
1. Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London, 1985), 333, 306.
2. William Blake’s verbal and visual accounts of the phenomenon of dictation (including his occasional resistance to it) are described by Leopold Damrosch, Jr., Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton, 1980), 302–7.
3. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination (New York, 1991), 177.
4. Ibid., 190, 187. We might assume that in aberrant image-making states—such as obsession and madness—the person has lost his or her freedom over the production of images. It is interesting that even here Sartre continues to insist on the exercise of the voluntary: in obsession, “consciousness resists itself”; in madness, he writes, drawing on Pierre Janet, “the mind forces itself to produce the object of which it stands in fear” (178, 192).
5. Ibid., 187, 191.
6. Gilbert Ryle, however, argues that there is no mental image, and he takes our difficulty in turning mental pictures upside down as evidence of the nonexistence of mental pictures (The Concept of Mind [London, 1949], 255). He contrasts his own view with David Hume’s (249–50). In both philosophy and cognitive psychology, people can be divided into those who believe we produce mental images and those who believe no such images exist in the mind. (In cognitive psychology the two are called “pictorialists” and “descriptionists,” respectively.)
The same division reappears among literary critics, as has recently been illustrated by Ellen Esrock’s fascinating interviews with Geoffrey Hartman and Northrop Frye (The Reader’s Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response [Baltimore, 1994], 183). Esrock argues that literary theory celebrated the image up until about 1920, then from 1920 to 1960 erased it altogether, not only in schools of literary theory such as New Criticism, but even in phenomenology, where one might have guessed its presence would be key (1, 3, 21–38).
From my point of view, as a believer in the mental image, those who do not credit its existence only confirm the truth that those images are normally faded, so faded that some people are (wrongly) tempted to doubt their existence. Stephen Kosslyn, a leading researcher on images in cognitive psychology, reports that people who at first describe themselves as having no mental images will often, when asked a specific question—such as, “Which is darker green, peas or a Christmas tree?”—suddenly agree that they do have images that they simply had not noticed before (personal conversation, January 1995). There may really be, of course, two different species of imaginers, some who have images, some who do not; just as within the group that has images there is substantial variation in the forms of imaging they can undertake. On the latter, see Kosslyn’s chapter entitled “People Are Different,” in Ghosts in the Mind’s Machine: Creating and Using Images in the Brain (New York, 1983), 193–204.
There are, then, three possibilities: (1) Everyone has images but not everyone recognizes, or describes herself as having, those images. Or (2) no one has images but a large part of the population for some reason believes themselves to have them. Or (3) there exist two populations, one of which has mental images and the other of which does not. In the first and second cases, people differ in how they describe mental life; in the third, people differ in mental life itself.
7. On rotation, see, for example, Roger Brown and Richard J. Herrnstein, “Icons and Images,” in Imagery, ed. Ned Block (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 33–49; Roger Shepard and Jacqueline Metzler, “Mental Rotation of Three-Dimensional Objects.” Science 171 (19 February 1971): 701–3; and Roger Shepard and Christine Feng, “A Chronometric Study of Mental Paper Folding,” Cognitive Psychology 3 (April 1972): 228–43. On instruction, see John Jonides et al., “Imagery Instructions Improve Memory in Blind Subjects,” Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 5, no. 5 (May 1975): 424; George Singer and P. W. Sheehan, “The Effect of Demand Characteristics on the Figural After-Effect with Real and Imaged Inducing Figures,” American Journal of Psychology 78, no. 1 (March 1965): 96–102; and Peter Sheehan and Ulric Neisser, “Some Variables Affecting the Vividness of Imagery in Recall,” British Journal of Psychology 60 (1969): 71–80.
8. F. J. Evan describes the mobility and immobility of arms in his article on “Hypnosis” in Encyclopedia of Psychology, ed. Raymond J. Corsini (New York, 1984), 2:173.
9. Janice M. Keenan and Robert E. Moore, “Memory for Images of Concealed Objects: A Reexamination of Neisser and Kerr,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory 5, no. 4 (1979): 376. Singer and Sheehan, “The Effect of Demand Characteristics,” 99. Keenan and Moore, “Memory for Images of Concealed Objects,” 378.
10. Peter W. Sheehan, Dixie Statham, and Graham A. Jamieson, “Pseudo-memory Effects and Their Relationship to Level of Susceptibility to Hypnosis and State Instruction,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60, no. 1 (1991): 132: italics added. The scholarly literature on hypnosis sometimes directly uses the word “instruction” in summarizing its own procedures: “Subjects were instructed to relive the half-hour before going to bed and were then taken through a staged reliving of the evening … by hourly steps, until around 2 o’clock.… Subjects … were instructed to look at the [imaginary] clock and check the time” (Terry McCann and Peter W. Sheehan, “Hypnotically Induced Pseudomemories—Sampling Their Conditions Among Hypnotizable Subjects,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54, no. 2 [1988]: 341; italics added).
11. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (New York, 1985), 43.
12. Allen Grossman in conversation (August 1992).
13. John Ashbery, “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name,” in Selected Poems (New York, 1985), 235.
4. Imagining Flowers
1. John Ashbery, “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name,” in Selected Poems (New York, 1985), 235.
2. Ashbery, “Whatever It Is, Wherever You Are,” in A Wave (New York, 1985), 63.
3. Seamus Heaney, “Feeling into Words,” in Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968–78 (New York, 1980), 14.
4. The place of roses in Rilke’s self-composed epitaph and the part played by the thorn of a rose in “accelerating” his death are described with great power by Ralph Freedman in the final chapter of Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke (New York, 1996), 530, 531, 546, 548. But Rilke’s sense of himself as a flower is equally visible in earlier years: the first journal he started (1895) was called Chicory Flowers (Wegwarten), a title influenced by the Zurich journal Sonnenblumen, as well as by the fifteenth-century Paracelsean legend that “once in each century … the chicory flower becomes a living person”; Freedman, Life of a Poet, 41, 42. It is not hard to guess what “living person” in particular Rilke might have believed was his century’s flower.
5. It might seem tempting to say that imagining is only as inseparable from its object as the perceptual acts (of which imagining is mimetic) are inseparable from theirs; the acts of seeing and hearing, for example, are often almost identical with the objects seen and heard. But some perceptual states, such as touch, are much less confined to their object, and even seeing and hearing undergo a level of variation to which imagining is not subject. For a fuller account of this argument, see Elaine Scarry, “Pain and Imagining,” in The Body in Pain (New York, 1985).
6. Elsewhere in this chapter (48, 65–71) and in the chapters on “Floral Supposition” and “Quickening with Flowers” I put forward the view that the blossom-as-an-imaginary-object begins to provide a sense of the felt experience of imagining.
A brilliant account of the felt experience of imagining is provided by the mathematician Barry Mazur, who takes issue with my claim that the imagination has no state independent of its objects. His essay “Imagining Numbers (Especially √ –15)” is a response to this chapter when originally published as “Imagining Flowers … (Particularly Delphinium).”
7. The association of flowers with beauty is long-standing. Plato says in both Phaedrus and Symposium that beauty, truth, and goodness exist together in the immortal realm, but beauty differs from the other two by having a “clearly discernible” presence in the material world: “Beauty shone bright in the world above, and [on earth] too it still gleams clearest.… As things are it is only beauty which has the privilege of being both the most clearly discerned and the most lovely”; Plato, Phaedrus 250, trans. Walter Hamilton (New York, 1973). This “clearly discernible” material thing summons our attention, eventually carrying us to immortal beauty, as well as to its less clearly discernible counterparts, truth and goodness.
It is almost certainly because flowers, whether seen or daydreamed, have this feature of “clear discernibility” that they are so bound up with beauty. Agathon in the Symposium says we know we are in the presence of the god Love when we see flowers: “The beauty of [the god’s] complexion is shown by his living among flowers; he never settles in any abode … that is incapable of blooming … but wherever he finds a spot that is flowery and fragrant, there he settles and abides”; Plato, Symposium 196B, trans. Walter Hamilton (New York, 1951). Thus Marsilio Ficino, in his 1475 Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, says that “beauty is the blossom, so to speak, of goodness,” in Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns, eds., Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger (Chicago, 1976), 217.
The three phenomena—beauty, flowers, and clear discernibility—continue to be linked both during periods when beauty is greatly honored and during periods when it is rejected or demoted. Both Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, in their writings on the beautiful and the sublime, take flowers as the key instance of the former: “It is the flowery species … that gives us the liveliest idea of beauty,” says Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford, 1990), 105; and Kant contrasts the non-clearly discernible shadows of the sublime’s sacred grove with the flower beds of beauty in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley, 1960). 47. The preference for the sublime in modern thought is a preference for objects that are beyond the radius of our compositional powers.
8. “Fifth Letter to Madame Delessert,” 16 July 1772, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Botany, A Study of Pure Curiosity: Botanical Letters and Notes Towards a Dictionary of Botanical Terms, trans. Kate Ottevanger (London, 1979), 72, 80. In other letters. Rousseau instructs Madame Delessert to look for, or even pick, an actual flower in bloom at the time of writing, as he does with the lily (first letter), the sweet pea (third letter), and the daisy (sixth letter). Here his instructions (e.g., pull the petal gently from below, gently tear the calyx, exposing what is underneath) may be understood either to require a literal act of touching the physical flower or to specify a set of mental steps to construct the flower’s structure imagistically.
9. Robert Nozick, when invited to try this mental experiment, immediately agreed that the image can be produced as easily in the forearm as in the forehead, but he questioned whether the image in the forearm is really in the forearm or in a picture of the forearm held in the forehead. Conversation with author, September 1994.
10. Rainer Maria Rilke. “The Bowl of Roses,” in New Poems [1907], trans. Edward Snow, rev. paperback trans. (San Francisco, 1984), 192–97.
11. Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” in Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York, 1982), 466. Responding to my description of Whitman’s lilac blossom, Donald Pease pointed out to me that Whitman’s blades of grass should be understood in the same way.
12. Jean Hagstrum comes up with the wonderful term “mental retina” (though he is not speaking about petals) in The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago, 1958), xx.
13. In the case of Whitman, Ashbery, and Blake, the flower remains intact even when its petals are used as the surface on which to construct other images. Sometimes when the flower is used as a template, it essentially disappears into the other image. Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is one of the most flower-filled of all novels; whole runs of pages occur in which a flower appears on every page. Although Flaubert’s flowers sometimes remain intact as flowers—whether in garden or meadow or window box—at other times they are introduced for their sheer power as template in constructing the face: an opera singer’s pale face emerges beneath “a wreath of orange blossoms in her hair” (253); the “gentle features of the Virgin [Mary] among the bluish clouds of rising incense” are prepared for by a mist “rising among the bare poplars, blurring their outlines with a tinge of purple” (125); a dew that “garnished the cabbages with silvery lace, and joined head to head with long shining filaments” leads to the face of a priest dusted with frost and plaster (71); one woman’s face is said to be as spotted as a meadow filled with flowers (169); and of another face, Flaubert writes “Not a hair was out of place in the blond chin whisker outlining his jaw: it was like the edging of a flower bed around his long, dreary face with its small eyes and hooked nose” (86). Made explicit, the images sound humorous. But in context, the flowers are barely noticed. Flaubert constantly introduces them so that he can continually reignite our image-making power with clematis, forget-me-nots, rosettes, and cactus,
The use of a flower as a work table on which to carry out more difficult mental acts also occurs in religious practice. Katherine Stern calls my attention to the place of lotus flowers in Eastern religions, and Del Kolve notes that the roses of the Catholic rosary assist acts of mental concentration. Conversations with the author, September 1996 and April 1999.
14. Stephen Michael Kosslyn, “Measuring the Visual Angle of the Mind’s Eye,” Cognitive Psychology 10 (1978): 381.
15. Joseph Addison, “On the Pleasures of the Imagination.” Paper 5, Spectator no. 415, 26 June 1712, in The Spectator: With a Historical and Biographical Preface, ed. A. Chalmers (Boston, 1872), 6:147, 148.
16. Virginia Woolf, “The Mark on the Wall,” in Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick (New York, 1985), 84.
17. John Ruskin, The Queen of the Air: Being a Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm (London, 1906), 112, 116, 117, 118. Scholars disagree about whether Queen of the Air is the first reference to Ruskin in Proust’s correspondence, but all agree that he speaks of it by December 1899 at the latest. See Richard Macksey’s introduction to Marcel Proust, On Reading Ruskin: Prefaces to La Bible d’Amiens and Sésame et les lys with Selections from the Notes to the Translated Texts, ed. and trans. Jean Autret, William Burford, and Phillip J. Wolfe (New Haven, Conn., 1987), xviii–xix n. 4.
18. “Third Letter to Madame Delessert,” 16 May 1772, in Rousseau, Botany, 48, 52; and see “Fifth Letter,” 72, 76.
19. D. H. Lawrence, “Purple Anemones,” in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (Santa Rosa, Calif., 1992), 64.
20. Rilke, “Opium Poppy,” in New Poems [1908]: The Other Part, trans. Edward Snow, rev. paperback trans. (San Francisco, 1987), 185. Rilke’s words in the first line cited are “die willig waren, offen und konkav.” The two final lines read: “gefranste Kelche auseinanderschlagend, / die fieberhaft das Mohngefäss umgeben.”
21. Kosslyn, “Measuring the Visual Angle of the Mind’s Eye,” 363.
22. The measurements given here have been rounded off for ease in picturing. A few fairly small paintings were composed in the 1870s or in 1880 (Portrait of Mallarmé, 1876, 11 × 14 inches; At the Café, 1878, 19 × 15; and Interior at Café, 1880, 12 × 18), but they are outnumbered by many large canvases. For reproduction and analysis of the lilac, rose, and water glass paintings, see Andrew Forge and Robert Gordon, The Last Flowers of Manet, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1986).
The account given here about the radius of our compositional powers perhaps holds true even for large paintings. A large landscape painting brings within the range of our constructive powers the beauty of the actual landscape, which, because of its scale, may—except from a very select viewing point—be outside the range in which the beautiful can be comprehended.
23. This record of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s last day (3 December 1919) is given both by Lawrence Hanson, Renoir: The Man, the Painter, and His World (New York, 1968), 294, and by Jean Renoir, Renoir, My Father, trans. Randolph Weaver and Dorothy Weaver (London, 1962), 404. A rogue account is given by Ambroise Vollard’s Renoir: An Intimate Record (New York, 1934), 225.
24. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (New York, 1905), 57. Hardy almost never allows any description to masquerade as the universal case, so when he does say something is the universal case, the sentence carries. “By the time he walked three or four miles every shape in the landscape had assumed a uniform hue of blackness” (91). Uniformity comes before us as an exceptional and extraordinary state.
25. Aristotle, On Colours 796a, 796b, trans. T. Loveday and E. S. Forster, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 1 (Princeton, 1984).
26. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination (New York, 1991), 177.
27. Henri Bergson, “The Soul and the Body,” lecture delivered in Paris, at Foi et Vie, 28 April 1912, in Henri Bergson, Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays, trans. H. Wildon Carr (Westport, Conn., 1975), 63–64. Bergson goes on to apply the same observation to acoustical images, specifically words: “The same word, pronounced by different persons, or by the same person at different times in different sentences, gives phonograms which do not coincide with one another. How, then, can the recollection of the sound of a word—a recollection which is relatively invariable and unique—be comparable to a phonogram?” (64).
28. Gilbert Wild’s Daylilies (Sarcoxie, Mo., 1991).
29. The painter A. H. Munsell originated his color notation system in 1898 and worked to adjust and perfect it for the next seventeen years. In addition to his widely dispersed color charts, Munsell also developed exercises for helping painters to think about color arrays three-dimensionally. In one exercise, he suggests imagining an orange with five segments pulled slightly apart but still joined at the bottom: “All the reds we have ever seen are gathered into one of those sections, all the yellows in another, all the greens in a third.” His choice of an orange is relevant to the present inquiry. It would seem counter-intuitive that the act of imagining color could be assisted by mentally displaying all colors on a sphere that is itself already saturated with one color in particular. But here again vegetable matter is assumed to be a template that will make the full array of colors more easily picturable despite the competition from a single color; A. H. Munsell, A Color Notation: An Illustrated System Defining All Colors and Their Relations by Measured Scales of Hue, Value, and Chroma (Baltimore, 1947), 17. See also A. H. Munsell, Atlas of the Munsell Color System (Malden, Mass., 1915), a supplement to the Color Notation handbook with many color charts in two and three dimensions.
30. Aristotle, On Plants 822b, 823a (my emphasis), trans. E. S. Forster, in Complete Works, vol. 2.
31. Rilke, “Blue Hydrangea,” in New Poems [1907], 113.
32. Rilke, “Bowl of Roses,” 197.
33. Rousseau, “Flower,” in Notes Towards a Dictionary of Botanical Terms, in Botany, 134.
34. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, trans. and intro. Reginald Snell (New York, 1965), 58.
35. J.-K. Huysmans. Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (New York, 1959), 55, 56.
36. Woolf, “Mark on the Wall,” 83.
37. William Wordsworth, “Evening Voluntaries VI,” “To the Same Flower,” “To the Daisy,” in Wordsworth: Poetical Works, eds. Thomas Hutchinson and Ernest de Selincourt (London, 1936), 358, 125, 453.
38. Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York, 1982), 30.11.61–69.
39. Joseph Addison, “On the Pleasures of the Imagination,” Paper 7, Spectator no. 417, 28 June 1712, in Chalmers, The Spectator, 6: 154, 156, 157.
40. Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (New York, 1991), 12. As Stephen Greenblatt points out to me, Andrew Marvell, in lines 27–32 of “The Garden,” delights in Ovid’s celebration of cross-species desire: “The gods, that mortal beauty chase, / Still in a tree did end their race. / Apollo hunted Daphne so, / Only that she might laurel grow./ And Pan did after Syrinx speed, / Not as a nymph, but for a reed”; in Andrew Marvell: The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (London, 1985), 100. Marvell promises that if he ever carves the name of a beloved in a tree, it will be not a human name but the name of the tree itself (lines 19–24).
41. Rousseau thought that philosophic cognition also required flowers: “Létude de la nature nous détache de nous-même et nous élève à son hauteur. C’est en ce sens qu’on devient vraiment philosophe; c’est ainsi que l’histoire naturelle et la botanique ont un usage pour la sagesse et pour la vertu”; “A Madame la duchesse de Portland,” 3 September 1766, cited by Bernard Gagnebin in his introduction to Lettres sur la botanique par Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Paris, 1962), xxxv.
42. Aristotle, Sense and Sensibilia 444a, trans. J. I. Beare, in Complete Works, vol. 1.
43. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman (Chicago, 1980), 24e: “What if I were to say that in both cases my hand feels tempted to draw them?”
44. Louise Glück, “The Doorway,” in The Wild Iris (Hopewell, N.J., 1992), 33.
45. Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.549–50, 554–57, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington, 1955) (my emphasis), Humphries’ beautiful threefold repetition of the word “still” is prompted by Ovid’s opening hanc quoque, which John Dryden also translates “still,” as does the early-eighteenth-century Samuel Garth translation “by various authors”; Frank Justus Miller in the 1984 revised Loeb translation and Mary Innes in a 1958 Penguin translation both give the phrase as “even” or “even now,” bringing to mind the etymological connection of “even” with “after” or “following upon” or “late” (C. T. Onions, Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, s.v. “even”; Robert K. Barnhart, Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, s.v. “even”), as well as the use of “still” to mean “even now” or “even then” first found in 1535 (Barnhart, Etymology, s.v. “still”). Humphries’ second use of “still” is prompted by Ovid’s adhuc, which is widely but not universally translated “still” (Dryden, Garth’s “various authors,” Innes, Miller). Humphries’ third “still” is prompted by the counterfactual “ut” (as when, as if), the “still” intensifying the carrying forward into the present of a condition that is only now an afterimage. The Innes translation is the only one other than the Humphries that explicitly marks this third moment, in her case with the word “even,” and hence is the only one that, like the Humphries, has a threefold repetition in this set of lines. But translators who give two repetitions (Dryden, Miller, Garth’s “various authors”) often construct the passage so that “still” carries into the lines describing the embrace; even in instances where there is only a single iteration, the word carries throughout the full set of lines, in part because of the sense of “lingering” and “remaining” (see the Brookes More translation and again the A. E. Watts 1980 translation). The force of the word “still” in part comes from the act of stopping—that is, from the nature of this particular metamorphosis, Daphne’s sudden immobilization, and in part from the way the word underscores what is perpetual (perpetually green, 1.567) and enduring (the laurel crown, 1.559) in a world of change. But a special power comes from the sense of afterimage.
46. Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.705, 712. Here Humphries’ use of the word “still” is prompted by Ovid’s use of the verb “kept” (nomen tenuisse puellae), which many translators also render with a verb: “He took and kept her name” (Miller); “He made her name endure” (Watts); “He preserved the girl’s name” (Innes), Dryden, like Humphries, uses the word “still” (“he still retains her name”); but Humphries, by making the act of preservation a direct speech act, writes a uniquely beautiful line, “He called them Syrinx, still.”
47. Plato, Timaeus 77, in Timaeus and Critias, trans. and intro. Desmond Lee (New York, 1977).
48. Aristotle, On Plants 815a.
49. W. Montagna, “The Skin,” Scientific American 11 (1959): 58–59, cited in Harvey Richard Schiffman, Sensation and Perception: An Integrated Approach (New York, 1976), 95.
50. Rilke, “The Lace,” in New Poems [1907], 93.
51. Sir Stewart Duke-Elder, The Eye in Evolution, vol. 1 of System of Ophthalmology (London, 1958), 3.
52. Marcus Meister, “The Retina” (lecture presented at the Science Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., October 1994).
53. Duke-Elder, Eye in Evolution, 4, 6.
54. Charles Darwin, The Power of Movement in Plants, vol. 27 of The Works of Charles Darwin, ed. Paul H. Barrett and R. B. Freeman (London, 1989), 415.
55. Ibid., 418.
56. Ibid., 409. Linnaeus’ flower clock is described by Duke-Elder, Eye in Evolution, 10.
57. Sophocles, Philoctetes, trans. Kenneth Cavander, in Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra, Philoctetes, ed. Robert Corrigan (New York, 1965), 189.
58. Euripides, Hecabe, 1.410, 2.435–37, in Medea and Other Plays, trans. and intro. Philip Vellacott (New York, 1963).
59. Rilke, “Bowl of Roses,” 193–95.
5. Radiant Ignition
1. Homer, Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles, intro. and notes, Bernard Knox (New York, 1990), 8:641, 650–53; 19: 424–30.
2. Ibid, 9:372; 19:496; 2:784 and 11:707; 19:51, 53, 62.
3. Ibid., 18:477, 450, 445.
4. Ibid., 1:637, 590–93; 18:431–33.
5. Ibid., 19:478, 473.
6. Ibid., 14:265.
7. Socrates in the Euthyphro (11B, 14E) makes the explicit connection between motion in material representation and in verbal representation by citing the sculpture of Daedalus, from whom he is descended, and promising to make pictures move in his own accounts.
8. Homer, Iliad, 19:438–78 passim. For the thematic meanings of the gleam that shoots from Achilles’ shield (19:448–49), see Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, rev. ed. (Baltimore, 1999), 338–42.
9. Ibid., 22:32–35, 38, 157–58, 160–61.
10. Ibid., 18:330. The flash makes the motion of his head visible, as when he nods—“And tall Hector nodded, his helmet flashing” (6:521)—or shakes his head (6:312), or shoots back words (6:620). But the flash also lets us see a revision in his posture across his limbs and torso—as when “shining Hector reached down for his son” (6:556–57). or when, in a picture Achilles makes of him, Hector lifts off the ground: “Now I’ll see if Hector, for all his flashing helmet, / leaps for joy when the two of us come blazing forth / on the passageways of battle” (8:431–33).
11. Ibid., 22:183–93 passim.
12. Ibid., 22:197–99; 21:392, 150, 339, 340, 435.
13. Ibid., 22:597–98.
14. Ibid., 9:412, 3:170, 207.
15. Ibid., 6:375–78 passim.
16. Ibid., 16:134–36, 127, 131–32.
17. Ibid., 14:393, 210, 214, 225.
18. Ibid., 6:473, 475.
19. Ibid., 22:547–48, 550–55.
20. Keats, “I Stood Tip-Toe,” lines 91–92; Wordsworth, “Dion,” 169, lines 18, 4; Whitman, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” 392; Homer, Iliad, 24:380.
6. Rarity
1. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Francis Steegmuller (New York, 1991), 117.
2. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. David Daiches (New York, 1965), 193, 367; Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 20, 279.
3. Homer, Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles, intro. and notes Bernard Knox (New York, 1990), 22:321–22, 337, 341.
4. Jeffrey Glassberg, Butterflies Through Binoculars: A Field Guide to Butterflies in the Boston–New York–Washington Region (New York, 1993), 33, 35.
5. A striking exception are the graceful Swallowtails, which have “a slow, hovering flight” (Glassberg, 23) that enables us, even while they are in flight—and before they have stopped to nectar on an Oriental lily (as does the Tiger Swallowtail), sassafras, or spicebush (as does the Spicebush Swallowtail), or parsley, carrots, and clover (the Black Swallowtail)—to discriminate the varying markings and colors. The slowness must be the reason that Glassberg gives almost no descriptions of individual flight and moves right to color. Something of the same occurs with the Nabokovian Blues. Glassberg gives some description of flight but much less than with Whites, Coppers, and Metalmarks. The explanation for this almost certainly lies in his observation that the flight of the Blues is “less rapid, easy-to-follow” (44), which means we can count on staying near them until they become still and can thereby go by color markings alone.
6. Ibid., 33. Glassberg’s virtuoso ability to specify flight for one hundred and sixty species may mislead us to overstate the ease with which the motion of rare things can be described. Glassberg’s descriptions are unusual. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov singles out the greatest descriptions of butterflies in French, Russian, and English literature, only one of which astonishes him for its precise account of motion.
Nabokov’s own descriptions of butterfly motion are ravishing: “at a spot where aspens crowded on both sides of a dip, I would be sure to find in the third week of June great blue-black nymphalids striped with pure white, gliding and wheeling low above the rich clay which matched the tint of their undersides when they settled and closed their wings.” “Over the small shrubs of bog bilberry with fruit of a dim, dreamy blue, over the brown eye of stagnant water, over moss and mire, over the flower spikes of the fragrant bog orchid (the nochnaya fialka of Russian poets), a dusky little Fritillary bearing the name of a Norse goddess passed in low, skimming flight.” His description of two Coppers depends on radiant ignition rather than rarity: “From a flower head two male Coppers rose to a tremendous height, fighting all the way up—and then, after a while, came the downward flash of one of them returning to his thistle.” The presence of a blossom in each description contributes to our ability to recompose the flight of his butterflies. (Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, intro. Brian Boyd [New York, 1999], 102, 106, 101.)
7. Ibid., 27–33 passim.
7. Addition and Subtraction
1. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Francis Steegmuller (New York, 1991), 16, 110.
2. Ibid., 279, my emphasis.
3. Homer, Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles, intro. and notes Bernard Knox (New York, 1990), 2:548, 469–73, 243–44; 9:6–7.
4. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. David Daiches (New York, 1965), 197.
5. Ibid., 48, 280.
6. Ibid., 199.
7. John Donne, “Elegy 19: To His Mistress Going to Bed,” in Complete English Poems, ed. A. S. Smith (New York, 1971), 125. Donne immediately follows the five stills with a line of awed exclamation that tells us the pictures, whether or not we quite realized it, did indeed get successfully made: “O my America, my new found land…” It is as though he had said to the reader, Please do this, and a moment later, Thank you for doing that, and in the momentum of being thanked we had the impression of the pictures having been successfully made. Praise God, Donne tells us in one of his meditations, and the attributes you specify in your praise will work as a kind of contract to tell Him what you hope to find in Him. Thank the reader, he might have said, and she or he will have the impression of having carried out the mental task you assigned, and will, by that belief, half accomplish the task if she or he did not do so before.
8. Walt Whitman, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” in Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York, 1982), lines 1–7.
9. As John Plotz points out, Thomas Hardy in “On the Western Circuit” creates the whirling motion of a roundabout (or merry-go-round) by a set of rapidly sequenced stills and may have had in mind a “phenakistiscope,” a nineteenth-century precursor of film consisting of a set of still pictures that could be spun (“Motion Sickness: Spectacle and Circulation in Thomas Hardy’s ‘On the Western Circuit,’” in Studies in Short Fiction 33 [1996], 374–79). Again, though, the rush of still pictures in the verbal arts predates by hundreds of years even the phenakistiscope.
10. Homer, Iliad, 22:237, 240–41; 2:901–3; 22:454–58.
8. Stretching, Folding, and Tilting
1. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Francis Steegmuller (New York, 1991), 25.
2. Ibid., 270, 275.
3. Ibid., 20. Emily Brontë often uses acoustical picturing, as when Nelly, listening through the wall, says, in a line that scans, “I distinguished Mr. Heathcliff’s step, restlessly measuring the floor.” (Wuthering Heights, ed. David Daiches [New York, 1965], 362.) Acoustical pictures of motion are a subject that needs to be treated more fully elsewhere, as I first realized when listening to John Plotz speak about the cadences of Hardy’s prose.
4. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 120, 272, 96.
5. Ibid., 111, 252.
6. Ibid., 97.
7. William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part One, Act 2:3, 91–92.
8. Flaubert, “A Simple Heart,” in Three Tales, trans. and intro. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth, 1961), 45.
9. Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 359.
10. Homer, Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles, intro. and notes Bernard Knox (New York, 1991), 2:168–73. When the Scamander River tries to evict Achilles from its midst, Homer combines stretching and downward rotation: the river “thrashing over Achilles’ shoulders raised a killer-wave— / the tremendous thrust of it slammed against his shield / and he staggered, lost his footing, his arms flung out / for a tall strong elm, he clung but out it came by the roots, / toppling down, ripping away the whole cliff, blocking the stream” (21:272–76, emphasis added).
11. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 15, 267.
12. Homer, Iliad, 1:66; 2:111, 117–19, 127, 132.
13. John Keats, “Song” (“I had a dove and the sweet dove died”).
14. William Wordsworth, “The Redbreast,” 114:14–17, 20–26.
15. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 116.
16. Ibid., 111–12.
17. Ibid., 254, 13, 279, 254, 20.
18. Ibid., 90.
19. Ibid., 271, 119, 96.
20. Ibid., 119, 251, 255.
21. Ibid., 15, 18.
22. Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 160, 161.
23. Ibid., 361, 363, 67.
24. Ibid., 67.
25. Ibid., 194.
26. Ibid., 136–37, 195.
27. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 254–55.
28. Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 189.
29. H. Damasio, T. J. Gabowsky, D. Tranel, R. D. Hichwa, A. R. Damasio, “A Neural Basis for Lexical Retrieval,” 380 Nature (1996), 499–505.
30. Alex Martin and his colleagues have shown this connection: unlike naming animals, naming tools activates a “left pre-motor [region of the brain] also activated by imagined hand movements, and an area in the left middle temporal gyrus activated by the generation of action words.” Alex Martin, Cheri L. Wiggs, Leslie G. Ungerleider, James V. Haxby, “Neural Correlates of Category-Specific Knowledge,” 379 Nature (15 February 1996), 649.
31. See Harvey Richard Schiffman, Sensation and Perception: An Integrated Approach (New York, 1976), 100, citing and adapting 1950 research by W Penfield and T. Rasmussen.
32. For Stephen Kosslyn’s research on the way imagining sensory data “piggybacks” on the neuronal paths for actual perception, see chapter 1, note 5; chapter 3, note 6; and chapter 4, note 14. Another study shows that the region of the brain activated in reading color words is close to the area involved in perceiving color; so, too, action words activate the region at work in the actual perception of action. See Alex Martin, James V. Haxby, François M. Lalonde, Cheri L. Wiggs, Leslie G. Ungerleider, “Discrete Cortical Regions Associated with Knowledge of Color and Knowledge of Action,” 270 Science (1995), 102.
33. Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 67.
34. Ibid., 263.
35. Wordsworth, Prelude, Book 1, lines 447–49, in Wordsworth: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, revised Ernest de Selincourt (London, 1967), 500. Eye motions, according to the neuroscientist J. Allan Hobson, play such a key part in night dreaming that “dream sleep” is often referred to as “REM sleep.” The rapid eye movements of REM sleep contribute to the vivacity of the dream images and have been explicitly linked to production of motion in the dream: the movement of a dream figure is believed to shift each time the eye jumps. The Dreaming Brain (New York, 1988), 142, 211.
36. This etymology, from the Middle English striden before 1200, is given by both Robert Barnhart (Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology [New York, 1988]) and C. T. Onions (ed., Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology [Oxford, 1966]). Barnhart adds that in Old English before 800 “stride” was a measurement, “the distance covered by a long step.” “Setting the legs wide apart” draws on ML German, striten. See also Ernest Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Amsterdam, 1971).
37. Walter Skeat brings together the two ideas—walking with a long step, and striving or contesting—by speculating that “stride” originates “from the contention of two men who, in walking side by side, strive to outpace one another and so take longer steps” (Etymological Dictionary of the English Language [Oxford, 1989]). But even without this ingenious and plausible reading, I think the two pictures of a “long” and a “longer” step are co-present.
38. Homer, Iliad, 6: 341–59.
39. Ibid., 17:445–60, 464–65.
40. Ibid., 17:493, 499–501, 502–8. In Frank Bidart’s elegy “A Coin for Joe, with the Image of a Horse; c. 350–325 BC,” the stretch of the horse’s neck, the solitary motion of the poem, conveys the longing to reach the space of persons (and even entire civilizations) now absent. In Desire (New York, 1997), 23.
41. Ibid., 24:404–6, 377–81.
42. Ibid., 22:514–15, 5l7–18, 547–54.
9. Floral Supposition
1. According to an 1821 Manual of Pharmacy and Drugs, orgeat—once made of barley—was by the nineteenth century made of almonds, the flowers of oranges, and sugar. The manual describes the color of the emulsion as “white-gray-yellowish” and specifies its odor and taste as that of orange flowers. The Manual is quoted in Trésor de langue française; Dictionnaire de la langue du XIXe et du XXe siècle (1789–1960). Centre national de la recherche scientifique (Paris, 1986), vol. 12, 623. Flaubert’s orgeat comes four paragraphs after his explicit mention of the orange flowers that wreathe Lucie’s hair (Madame Bovary, trans. Francis Steegmuller [New York, 1991], 253).
2. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 255.
3. Conversation with George Salt, King’s College, Cambridge University, May 1996, and letter from George Salt, 19 July 1996. All books about paper and ink cited here were generously suggested to me by Professor Salt. Ernest Walter Peacock, in his article on ink in Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, observes that ink made from the suspension of carbon particles has been used from 3400 B.C. Egypt to the present (rev. ed. [London, 1973], VII, 583). The date for iron-gall writing ink is controversial: some scholars cite the recipes of the twelfth-century Theophilus as the earliest source; but other scholars point to A.D. 600 or 700; still others give the date as A.D. 100 since the Hebrew Mishnah often mentions among ink ingredients copperas, gall nuts, and tree gum (583–85). Juices from plants—cashew nuts, marking nuts, poison oak, poison ivy—have been used for marking linens since 2697 B.C. (Peacock, 584).
4. Theophilus, The Various Arts (De Diversis Artibus), ed. and trans. C. R. Dodwell (Oxford, 1986), 34.
5. Frederick Howard Llewellyn Thomas, “Paper,” in Chambers’s Encyclopaedia X, 434–36. Gradually, over the centuries, plants have almost completely displaced parchment and vellum, except for documents. For a rich account of animal materials, see R. Reed, Ancient Skins, Parchments, and Leathers (London, 1972). It is fascinating to notice that some of the vegetable materials used in paper and in the two forms of ink reappear in animal tanning. Reed cites an 800 B.C. Sumerian text that gives instructions for immersing hides in vegetable products (48) such as flour, beer, wine, and oak galls; ancient Babylonian and Egyptian texts speak of galls in tanning (76). Reed elsewhere observes that the process of vegetable tannage is four thousand years old: “the majority of leathers of ancient origin are likely to have come into contact with vegetable tannins … at some stage … in their production” (72, 81). Parchment, unlike leather, is not tanned; but when tannin forms of ink are put down on parchment, the ink interacts with the fibers in a way similar to tanning (155). Lime, the ashes of vegetable matter, is another material used in preparing parchments (57, 136) and perhaps may resemble in some of its actions the effect carbon-suspension ink has on paper.
6. Homer, Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles, intro. and notes Bernard Knox (New York, 1991), 2:549–54.
7. Ibid., 2:102–5, 171–72, 173–75.
8. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 104–8.
9. Homer, Iliad, 2:879–82.
10. Seamus Heaney, “Mycenae Lookout,” in The Spirit Level (New York, 1996), 33.
11. Homer, Iliad, 24:528–38. Here, as so often elsewhere, one action acts as a rehearsal for another. A few lines farther on, Thetis is mentally invoked—“his mother with lovely hair”; then a moment later, “Priam swung down to earth” (24:547, 550). The conflated actions of “swinging hair” and “Priam swung down” seem so deep in the Iliad that it sometimes seems Homer foresaw the full motion of the story when he first saw in his mind Helen’s loose and lustrous hair.
12. Ibid., 18:509–11. See also 18:64–66.
13. Ibid., 17:59–66.
14. See J. V. Luce, “The Polis in Homer and Hesiod,” 78 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (1978), 1–15, as well as Gregory Nagy, “The Shield of Achilles: Ends of the Iliad and Beginnings of the Polis,” in Susan Langdor, ed. New Light on a Dark Age: Exploring the Culture of Geometric Greece (Columbia, Mo., 1997), 194–207.
15. Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt, intro. and notes A. R. Burn, rev. ed. (New York, 1986), 41–45, 170–75.
16. Homer, Iliad. 18:558–709.
17. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. David Daiches (New York, 1965), 262.
18. Ibid., 263.
19. Ibid., 263, emphasis added.
20. Ibid., 265.
10. Circling Back
1. Aristotle is here summarizing judgments by earlier philosophers he will go on to dispute. On the Soul (De Anima), trans. with intro. and notes, Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London, 1986), Book I, chapter 2, section 405A, and chapter 3, section 406B. The observations about circles are more vividly phrased in the Lawson–Tancred translation than in the J. A. Smith translation used in chapter 2.
The ease the mind has in picturing spheres, audible in statements made by philosophers of the past, is also apparent in research today by cognitive psychologists and neuropsychiatrists. See above, chapter 3, note 7, on the literature of rotation experiments: and see as well J. Allan Hobson’s observations about the prevalence of “curvilinear trajectories” in night dreaming in Dreaming Brain, 248–50.
2. Homer, Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles, intro. and notes Bernard Knox (New York, 1991), 18:262–64, 330, 434, 437–40.
3. Ibid., 17:303–4 (cf. 410), 130–32, 320–26, 813, 815–25.
4. Ibid., 24:315–17, 432–33, 315, 523–25, 181, 213, 225, 311, 315–17.
5. Ibid., 24:19 (cf. 60–61), 491–92 (cf. 887), 64, 682, 688–93, 679, 758–59, 798, 836, 850–52, 932–35. Andromache cradles Hector’s head and Hector is carried back to her in a wicker cradle, but Homer never says that Hector is rocked in that cradle, perhaps because it would push the already painful blend of stateliness and tenderness too far in the direction of tenderness. Homer sustains the tender tone while protecting Hector from the aura of infancy by re-situating the rocking motion on the magnificent figure of Priam. When Cassandra looks out over the walls of Troy and sees her father returning with her brother’s body, Homer says: “she saw her beloved father swaying tall in the chariot” (24:822).
6. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. David Daiches (New York, 1965), 160.
7. William Wordsworth, “Water Fowl,” in Wordsworth: Poetical Works, eds. Thomas Hutchinson and Ernest de Selincourt (London, 1936), 174:8–14.
8. Homer, Iliad, 24:272.
9. Kenn Kaufman, Lives of North American Birds (Boston, 1996), 345.
10. See Ibid., 347, 342, 348.
11. Ibid., 334. Kaufman prefaces his recitation of names by remarking on the way the names suggest “the dazzling beauty of [the birds’] colors.”
12. Homer, Iliad, 24:318–25.
11. Skating
1. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenin, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (New York, 1954), 43, 44. The skating scene is at 42–45.
2. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. David Daiches (New York, 1965), 51, 47, 273, 275.
3. John Ashbery, “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name,” in Selected Poems (New York, 1985), 235.
4. Seamus Heaney, “Crossings xxviii,” in Seeing Things (New York, 1991), 82.
5. E. R. Gregory, Milton and the Muses (Tuscaloosa, 1989), 22. Gregory bases his conclusion on the various grammar books available during Milton’s schooling: musa was “the paradigmatic first-declension noun.”
6. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York, 1977), 66, 58.
7. Heaney speaks of “the vitality,” “cheerfulness,” and “narrative push” of Wordsworth’s skating, but simultaneously, beneath this local motion, of the palpable roll of the earth both here and throughout Wordsworth’s walking poems: “As his poetic Feet repeat his footfalls, the earth seems to be a treadmill that he turns; the big diurnal roll is sensed through the poetic beat and the world moves like a waterwheel under the fall of his voice,” in “The Makings of a Music: Reflections on Wordsworth and Yeats,” Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968–1978 (New York, 1980), 68.
8. William Wordsworth, The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s Mind: An Autobiographical Poem, Book 1, lines 431–34, in Wordsworth: Poetical Works, eds. Thomas Hutchinson and Ernest de Selincourt (London, 1936), 500.
9. Homer, Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles, intro. and notes Brenard Knox (New York, 1991), 24:316, 328–29.
10. Wordsworth, Prelude, Book 1, lines 446–63.
11. For the letters that together make the sound of skates stopping short, I am grateful to Joseph Scarry, who also calls my attention to the sounds athletes assign to various motions: shchoosh in skating, schuss in dog sledding, swish when a basketball goes through the net without touching the rim or backboard. See, for example, Ken McAlpine, “A Quick Schuss in the Woods,” Sports Illustrated, February 1997.
12. “Crossings xxvii,” in Seeing Things, 81; and see the beautiful “The Ash Plant,” and “1.1.87,” on 21, 22. Heaney speaks in “Crossings xxvii” about his biological father; but, as described below, it may also be in part a spiritual father who is present.
13. Wordsworth, Prelude, Book 1, lines 4, 62, 68, 397, 489.
14. Wordsworth, Prelude, Book 1, lines 80–85, 307–9, 616, 483–85.
12. Quickening with Flowers
1. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenin, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (New York, 1954), 40, 41, 45.
2. Ibid., 260–61.
3. Ibid., 270–73 passim, 276.
4. Ibid., 276–77.
5. Ibid., 212–14 passim.
6. Paul Robert, Le Grand Robert de la langue française: Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1985), iv, 746. Verlaine, Romances sans paroles, cited in Le Grand Robert.
7. J. E. Mansion, Harrap’s New Standard French and English Dictionary (London, 1981), vol. 1, F: 45, and Le Grand Robert.
8. H. Meilhac and L. Halévy, Frou-Frou (London, 1980). Tolstoy scholars have found the heroine’s acts of infidelity a relevant analogue to Tolstoy’s Anna. See Amy Mandelker, Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel (Columbus, Ohio, 1993), 155, 208 n.30. Throughout the play, the heroine is associated with motion (she enters at a “whirlwind gallop”) and with silky cloth (43, 49, 71).
9. Tolstoy, Anna Karenin, ballroom scene at 90–96 passim.
10. Ibid., 93.
11. Ibid., 96.
12. Jeffrey Glassberg, Butterflies Through Binoculars: A Field Guide to Butterflies in the Boston–New York–Washington Region (New York. 1993), 69, 48.
13. Tolstoy, Anna Karenin, 93. The Russian word Tolstoy uses three times for the color lilac, “lilovyi,” is—like the French color word “lilas” and the English color word “lilac”—ultimately connected to the Arab, Persian, and Turkish words for the lilac bush. But whereas in French and English the word for the color is identical with the word for the plant (“lilas” in French, “lilac” in English), in Russian the plant is called “siren.” Perhaps, then, for a reader of the original Russian, the haze of color Kitty places around Anna is wholly an emanation of the pansies Anna actually wears rather than, as I am suggesting, a hybrid of the pansies and the lilac blossom embedded in the French. On behalf of the latter, however, it should be said that Tolstoy uses French phrases throughout the ballroom scene, inviting movement back and forth between Russian and French (just as in the steeplechase scene he includes English sentences in the midst of his description of Cord, possibly encouraging the recognition of an English homonym in the groom’s name at the moment he streches the reins).
14. Ibid., 92, 93, 90, 202.
Conclusion: Teaching Made-up Birds to Fly
My account of birds in Parts Two and Three draws here and there on books read over many years. The body temperature and heartbeat of a cardinal, as well as the feather count of hummingbird and swan (here), are specified by Olin Sewall Pettingill, Jr., A Laboratory and Field Manual of Ornithology (revised 3rd edition, Minneapolis, 1956), 34, 76, 78. Frank B. Gill’s Ornithology (2nd edition, New York, 1992), 132, 136, shows the transfer of heat from arteries to vein (and even specifies the precise temperature, 1F, at which a cardinal begins to shiver). The way a flock of birds can move as a single piece of cloth (here) was suggested to me by Ellen Walker. The contact call of a cardinal is usually specified as “chip” or “tsip,” but June Osborne’s “chink” exactly reproduces the sound I myself hear (Cardinal, Austin, Texas, 1992). The pliancy of a hummingbird’s nest, stretching as the infants grow (here), is celebrated in many handbooks. The quoted descriptions of a raven’s and a dove’s nest (here) are from Kenn Kaufman’s Lives of North American Birds (New York, 1996), 430, 292; but the quoted description of a cardinal’s nest as a “loose affair” occurs in T. Gilbert Pearson’s Birds of America (New York. 1923), vol. 3, p. 63