I TEACH ENGLISH in Maine, and I come from Conway, South Carolina. When I was young, an old lady introduced me to the facts of life. "Up north," she said, "all they want to know is 'What do you do?' Down south, all they care about is 'Where do you come from?""
In my childhood, that was welcome news. The northern question would obviously be harder to answer than the southern one, since it required self-justification. So I figured I might as well stay put. I wouldn't have to do; I could simply be, as though I were an aristocrat along the lines of John of Gaunt or Guy of Warwick: Franklin of Conway. .
Before I was a great deal older, I discovered more facts of life, and one of them was that most of the people I knew, North and South, were de facto copperheads or carpetbaggers - Confederate Yankees for Yankee Confederates. Whichever question they asked you first, the other one was sure to follow.
If you think about it, it could hardly be otherwise, whether you are answering to a stranger or just talking, as usual, to yourself. Your boss or your conscience accosts you and demands one thing: "What have you done for me lately?" You can't very well answer that you have come from where you came from. But there are plenty of other times when you are doing whatever it is that the boss or your conscience has gotten you into and you are suddenly overcome by the sheer speciousness of it. There has been some ludicrous or lamentable misapprehension. You are not so much an impostor as a case of mistaken identity. Who are all these people and who are you? Why are you all in such solemn earnest, like so many emperors assiduously complimenting each other on their new and identical and nonexistent wardrobes?
It probably doesn't make much difference whether you stay home or light out for the territories. Even Thoreau, who strove to shrink the gap between vocation and location to the disappearing point, often felt, as he said, "a certain doubleness, by which I stand as remote from myself as from another," and that enabled him to see Concord as though it were a distant land, from which he was writing home, to a kinsman. Something about writing, or even about the committed kind of reading that is a vicarious form of writing, takes you well away from your life and makes you homesick
for it.
This essay is about a poem, Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Pied Beauty," because writing or talking about poems is one of the things that English professors profess to do. We have been doing it, in ever-increasing numbers, for almost the whole of this century. The more something is written or talked about, the less real and distinct it becomes. If you attend to the doings of English professors these days at all — if you so much as know the difference between a deconstructionist and a dirt dauber — then you know that this is a fact. You know that we are now unsure whether a poem is really a poem or just an overprivileged text, which in turn turns out to be not a text but a mere pretext for the next metatextual meditation.
I am uncomfortable with this state of affairs, but will avail myself of the license it grants and talk about "Pied Beauty" in an utterly idiosyncratic way, which is from the perspective of where I come from and how that consorts with what I do.
I was in fact driving north through Pennsylvania, headed from Conway back up toward Maine, and so just about exactly halfway between where I come from and what I do, when Hopkins's poem came into my mind. Hopkins isn't anybody I regularly teach or ever write about, but I had loved his poems when I first read him as an undergraduate, and that had led me to memorize a few. An enthusiasm of that kind is like a wonderful correspondence that you carry on for a while it runs in your head and affects how you see and describe to yourself the things around you. As is usual in such cases, the enthusiasm waned, the correspondence dried up, not because of any particular reason, but just because of the way the same old same old takes over your life and you don't have any time for such things, and perhaps do not like to face the contrast between your imaginary and your actual existence.
It was a small and pleasant surprise, then, to find myself back in touch with Hopkins, and able at least partially and approximately to reassemble "Pied Beauty" out of my memory. But right now I need to leave him again and tell about this trip south and how, near the end of it, as I drove north through Pennsylvania, the poet and the poem came to mind.
This was three or four years ago, in March, which is the best season for such a junket. When you drive south from New England at that season, you also drive ahead, into springtime the weeks hurtle past as though your life were in fast-forward. When you return north, you go backward, the season rewinding itself, unfrocking the trees, silencing the birds, returning the daffodils to the cold storage of the bulb. It's like crossing the international dateline, and then crossing it back. You've gained time, and then you've lost almost all of it again, and the only evidence that the whole trip wasn't just a hallucination is the odometer.
There are other changes besides the seasonal one that accompany the journey south. When you stop for gas in the Virginia tidewater, you hear that something has happened to the language. Tongues seem to have lost their agility. Vowels and consonants thicken and soften; cadences and sentences ooze and eddy and ebb, and you can stand there, half listening to the attendant and half thinking of the silt-laden, leisurely rivers and streams and swamps that wind through this flat country and in fact created it, and wonder if they also had a kind of subliminal shaping effect on what had come across the Atlantic as English.
Along with this change in the language, there is also another one for me, one that has less to do with going from North to South than with going from what I do to where I come from.
Teaching English means a day-to-day linguistic environment of lectures, seminars, conferences, committee meetings, office hours, recommendations. Professionally speaking, this world of words is the only string in my fiddle, the only capital I've got to invest, and the only return the investment brings. But knowing that makes the words seem more like walls than like windows, because their circuit seems so closed. They beget each other endlessly, weave a web that unravels even as it is being woven from the yarn of yesterday's web.
South Carolina, God knows, is also a world of words. But because I neither commit professional activities nor associate with those who do when I am there, the words still seem to speak to me, as the old lady did, about the facts of life. Around a college, if a man is said to be outstanding in his field, it probably indicates that he knows and writes a great deal about a relatively specialized topic. Around Conway, if a man is said to be outstanding in his field, it quite possibly indicates that he is shooting doves. It isn't that the one kind of activity is superior to the other. It's just that it's a relief to be reminded occasionally that words, like people, came from somewhere to start with and had a pedestrian solidity there. Packed off to college, they gain an upward mobility into abstraction and, with it, a wider reference: Intellectual gain can be imaginative loss. This man was outstanding in his field sounds like an epitaph - a flat assertion and end of story. This man was outstanding in his field sounds like the beginning of a story: because the man is in space, he is in time, and time will require him to do and to die, and so a certain suspense is involved.
Anyway, I went to South Carolina three or four springs ago, when timber salvage from Hurricane Hugo was still going on. And one of the places it was going on was about fifty miles south of Conway, in the Santee Refuge, where it was being performed with scrupulous care by the lowest bidder. He was in fact charging the state nothing at all except the right to a certain percentage of the timber he salvaged and an electrical hookup for his secondhand, Eisen hower-administration Airstream trailer, where he would live until he had finished the job. This was my peripatetic friend McIyer, somebody I grew up with and was not destined to outgrow. I went down to the Refuge to join him for a couple of days of what was business as usual for him, and the finest kind of truancy for me.
McIver had set up his portable sawmill on a sandy ridge, under some young live oaks. We'd spent the morning sawing the last few logs he had there, and now were stacking and sorting lumber. It was all longleaf pine — bold-grained, handsome, heavy wood. The wood, our clothes, and the sawdust underfoot were all so redolent of turpentine that it evoked studios and painting classes, and got you thinking about the proximity of the most sophisticated arts to the most elementary ones. What we lifted, lugged, and stacked were timbers: six-by-sixes, four-by-fours, two-by-fours - structural stuff. There were also planks, of assorted standard widths and lengths and various grades. The timbers we piled according to their dimensions; the planks we piled according to their grade.
And, McIver being McIver, what we lifted, lugged, and stacked also included slats and stakes, wood you might use to build a chicken coop or prop up your tomatoes. He can't bear throwing anything away. He'd had a partner once, and the partner quit, being unable to see the economic logic of sawing slats that might bring five dollars a bundle, provided you could find the time to bundle them and the gardeners to buy them. But economics for McIver has always been a branch of applied philosophy, and philosophy a sort of folk art, like making patchwork quilts, where you stitch together something that will serve your purpose and express your sense of proportion and design out of whatever odds and ends and bits and pieces come to hand. Partners, of either the business or the connubial variety, have always found upon closer examination that this philosophy is chiefly admirable from a distance, and now my hardheaded old friend lives and works alone...
With regard to trees and lumber and a good many other things, his credo is simple. "I waste nothing," McIver says, "except my time."
· You pile lumber as though it were fragile. Each pile is level. There is a half-inch gap between each pair of planks in each tier of lumber, and the tiers are separated from each other by stringers
- narrow battens that McIver saws from slabwood. The stringers are roughly half an inch wide and exactly half an inch thick, a little longer than the tier is wide, and placed across it at three-foot intervals. As the pile mounts, the weight coming to bear on the lower levels also mounts. As long as that weight is evenly distributed, there is no harm in this, and even some good - it reduces the tendency of the planks to bow or bend as they dry. But if one stringer is even slightly thicker or thinner than the others, it will stress the board it rests on and the board that rests on it as the weight piles up. So we stack meticulously and methodically — the right plank properly placed on the right pile - as though we were file clerks or librarians reshelving books.
Spaced along the sandy road, the stacks of new-cut wood are pleasing. They are overhung by the gnarled oaks with their streamers of moss; the leafy shadows and soft humid light flit and flicker over them. They draw the eye and hold it. If you block from your sight and thinking the saw, the sawdust, and the slabwood — all the evidence of ordinary human agency and ordinary economic activity — the whole scene, a random imposition of strict, rectilin ear order on the disorder of nature, exerts a minor spiritual magnetism, as though you'd come upon some rudimentary, homemade Stonehenge.
Such money as McIver makes will come from the smallest of the piles of planks — top-quality, cabinet-grade lumber. Longleaf is a slow-growing pine, almost as dense and hard as oak. From the standpoint of commercial forestry, it is a tree that wastes time. Economics pretty well dictates that you reseed a plot with slash or loblolly, fast-growing trees, once you've cut the longleaf. But no other pine produces its quality of lumber. The slow years get stored in the grain; they become strength inseparable from beauty. The wood is prized for flooring, paneling, furniture.
We hoist a plank, examine one side. Smooth, straight-grained, no knots. We flip it and examine the other side. It looks fine to me, but McIver sighs. He wants to put it on the small pile, the money pile; but instead it goes in with the lowest grade of all — the next step down would be the sawdust pile.
"What was wrong with that one?" I ask him. "SAT scores too low?"
"Nope," he says. "Compression wood. See?" I see, but only because I am shown.
Compression wood comes from a leaning tree. The force of gravity would cause the trunk to bend and sag, and eventually to break, if the tree did not automatically respond by a more rapid, denser production of cellular wood along the underside of the trunk - something like the tensing of a muscle to resist whatever pushes or pulls against it. Once the counterpressure is removed, a tensed muscle can relax. But a plank isn't like that. It can't forget the torques and tensions that shaped it as part of a living and mis aligned organism. Freed from the log, it will contort itself, warp, rack, or bulge, no matter how long you cure it or how much you clamp, nail, steam, or spike it. Under stress, it may snap with ex plosive suddenness.
McIver and I grew up within a few hundred yards of each other, went through school and then to college together. We get along because we are in the habit of it, and understand our roles. Mine combines the wise guy, the Fancy Dan, and the straight man. "Look," I say to him from my end of the plank. "What we are talking about here is neurosis, pure and simple. This plank ain't a bad plank. It just suffers from posttraumatic stress syndrome. Has anybody ever tried a little elementary psychotherapy on compression wood?" .
McIver gives me a look. He's missing a little finger; he has, as consequence of a misstep taken in Southeast Asia, slivers of shrapnel in one leg and a custom-fitted, stainless-steel patch in his skull. "No need for them to try it on compression wood," he says. "They've tried it elsewhere. And I am here to tell you, it don't work."
When he's in his customary mode of working alone, McIver has a transistor radio with headphones. He listens exclusively to the local NPR station, except when it plays jazz, which he dislikes. When it schedules jazz, he schedules chainsawing, which makes listening impossible in any case. If there's no chainsawing to be done, he may shift over briefly to a Top 40, evangelical, or talk station - fluff, salvation, or the vox populi, against which to hone his dis dain. But mostly he likes the NPR news of local and global affairs. It requires him to adjust his homemade philosophic patchwork so that it can incorporate a mosaic of rumors, wars, trends - epidemics of revolution, multinational finance, resurgent tribalism, ecological catastrophe, congressional reform, the colonization of cy berspace, and the long-term outlook for the catfish industry — all of this to be seriously mulled over while he aligns the log on the carriage, walks the little high-pitched band saw down through the log, and lays off the planks he will stack later, to Mozart, Haydn, Debussy.
He knows where he stands and why he stands there. You could blindfold him and put him down anywhere in North America, remove the blindfold, and tell him only what month it was. If the place had trees, he would find them and study them. It might take a day or two. Then he would tell you where he was - latitude, longitude, elevation. He might be wrong, but he would not be hesitant beforehand or apologetic afterward. He would prefer his way of being wrong to your way of being right. His way involves independent observation and deduction, the laws of Humboldt, a close reading of habitat through a coherent idea of geography. Yours involves numbered highways and road signs, mere slogans and hearsay. You might as well stay home and read a map.
The barrage of world news and news closer to home confirms his faith in what he calls primary resources — wood, crops, animals, ores: things that come out of the earth and water to provide us food, fuel, and shelter. In the course of one conversation, McIver lays down a law: "People who don't work with primary resources don't understand reality. And not understanding reality is a functional definition of insanity." That leads him inevitably to conclude that the trouble with the world today is that the inmates are running the asylum. You need to be grounded and rooted in geography; you need to understand that money measures time in one way and a longleaf pine measures it in another. The pine can make money, but the money can't afford to return the favor. If McIver were Robinson Crusoe, alone on his desert island, his way of thinking and living would require surprisingly few adjustments. He achieves by logic and implacable opinion what Crusoe achieved by shipwreck: isolation, and the consequent opportunity to reinvent civilization, starting with the simplest necessities and working up and out from them.
When he isn't on a job and living in the Airstream trailer, he lives in Conway, on an otherwise respectable street. The house hasn't been painted in a long time, nor has the shrubbery been trimmed, the grass mowed, or the mildew or the rot in any way inconvenienced in its operations. A row of small sweet gums has sprouted in a gutter; every year, the whole structure has faded a little further back into nature, and now, except for its size, it resembles an abandoned duck blind. Inside, the only sign of neatness is in the front corner of the living room, where there are a small table and chair beside a window, and some bookshelves made of pine he cut himself. In those things, you can recognize the tidy, thrifty worker. On the table is a complicated mechanism for sharpening the band-saw blades. He comes here every week or two, bringing an accumulation of blades, and sits down and sharp ens. It is as precise as any task a jeweler does. He dons glasses and a scholarly air. Every tooth must be aligned just so, raked alternately to one side and the other. When he is done, the facets of the teeth gleam delicately and sliver paper or skin as elegantly as a razor.
The rest of the room and the rest of the house are bad to look at. Possessions have become jetsam. They are thrown on chairs, jammed in closets, abandoned on the floor. You let appearances slide, and it is harmless; then you let them slide further, let them go altogether, and discover that there was more reality in them than you thought. They take away whatever energy and self-respect you had invested in them, and they keep it. There is grit in the rug; a scum of dust, as thick as the springtime pollen, covers everything. Even a man in his worst, most worn-out working clothes would wipe off any surface before he sat on it. McIver : doesn't have a vacuum cleaner, which doesn't matter because the electricity has been cut off for months. "And anyway," he says, looking at the clutter, "I don't need a vacuum cleaner. I need a backhoe."
When he was a boy, he was neat, his room as spruce and spare as a barracks. It was the same in college and in the marines. After that he was a smokejumper in the United States Forest Service, and smoke jumpers, whatever else they are, are fanatically orderly about their personal effects, packing and repacking their parachutes, maintaining their gear as though their lives depended on it, because their lives depend on it. He smoke-jumped for more years than anybody in the history of the organization; in a book I can't sufficiently praise, Young Men and Fire, Norman McLean refers to him in passing simply as "Rod McIver, dean of the Mon tana smoke jumpers." When he finally landed wrong and ruined his knee and couldn't jump anymore, the Forest Service told him that if he'd accept a desk job for five years, he would qualify for a pension that would pretty much take care of him for the rest of his life. He declined, took his severance pay, came home, and used the money to buy his portable mill.
Somewhere along the way, he lost his aptitude for domestic life and developed a great harshness toward that side of himself which still craved it. That was what his house said, and in bleak moments he comes close to saying it himself. Indispensable small tools, hardware, and spare parts that might get buried and lost in the rubbish of his house, he keeps in his disconnected refrigerator. He steps carefully over a pile of magazines, opens the refrigerator door, and takes out a packet of sheet-metal screws. You half expect to see him sit down at the kitchen table, toss them lightly in WD-40, and eat them.
"Some people think of a house as a home," McIver says. "I prefer to think of it as an equipment shed. Where I sometimes store myself." And he says one thing more to me before I go back to Maine. "Drop by and see Mama before you go. It always pleases her. She says you're my last link to civilization."
I would have done so in any case. When we were growing up, I knew her house as well as my own; I came and went in it as freely and breathed in it almost more freely. I stop by on the last morning, on my way out of town.
She is retired from teaching now, old and crippled by arthritis. We sit in her small parlor, a room that has scarcely changed from my childhood: the same furniture, the same Audubon print of the wild turkey over the hearth, the coal grate on the hearth, and beside it a scuttle and a basket. The scuttle is filled with coal, the basket is mounded with longleaf pinecones. These are spent cones, their teeth splayed open; you can pick them up by the bushel in the Santee Refuge. In both size and shape, they roughly approximate footballs. In the basket, they are woody, dark, and handsome, with the understated decorative look of dried flowers. She prizes them for that, but also because they are an excellent kindling. Like much in her household, they combine simplicity, a provident thriftiness, and a natural elegance that I wish I could have absorbed by osmosis, simply from all the hours and days and years spent there.
We talk for a while, and then it is time to go. With difficulty, she sees me to the door, and we stand there a minute longer. She asks about the drive back up to Maine. How long does it take? Are the roads safe? Is my car reliable? And that leads her to fret some, and not for the first time, about her son's truck. He bought it right after he was discharged from the marines. Now, like his house, it appears to be held together by force of habit rather than by any surviving principle of structural integrity. The door on the passenger side is wired shut, but a passenger could conceivably escape, if he had to, through the floor, which yawns open like a bomb bay between his feet. The odometer conked out somewhere in the Great Plains, five or six years ago, at 297,411 miles. It's getting hard to find spare parts now. Even the most comprehensive junkyards aren't likely to have a supply of '69 Ford F 250 pickups on hand, and McIver doesn't like parking the truck too close to a junkyard anyway, for fear that when he gets back to it, he may find that another customer, by a perfectly innocent and natural confusion, has removed someone of its remaining operative systems.
"You know," Mrs. McIver says, "I do worry about that old truck. I'm afraid that one of these days it's going to break right down and leave him by the road. I wish he'd take it now while it's still running and just trade it in."
· I say that I guess that's right, but that he has had the truck for so long that it seems like part of his personality now.
"Well, yes," says Mrs. McIver. "And sometimes I wish he'd just trade that in too."
Then I drove back north, trading longleaf pine for white pine,. dahoon and yaupon for bayberry and viburnum, sweet gum for sugar maple, cypress for hemlock, and always losing species as I drove, moving through arboreal environments of progressively diminishing complexity until I was back in Maine, which has wound up being home. That coincided with another process of simplification, as experience became memory, and memory concentrated on some details and lost others. By the time I was up into Pennsylvania, the days spent with McIver had reduced themselves to a single image, something I could pick up and turn over and squint at from several angles - the plank of compression wood, as a metaphor or an epitome, or maybe just a souvenir..
Most obviously, the plank could be taken to stand for my old friend himself. Something that could not forget the history that had shaped it and had necessitated and justified its idiosyncrasies. Something that so perfectly incorporated the stresses and misalignments, and imperatives of the circumstance from which it had been abstracted that it would never accept as real or rational any other circumstance to which fate consigned it. Something that did not fit in; that was, to the vexation of all concerned, a manifestly high-quality article of rare integrity, ingrained recalcitrance, and small market value.
But even as a metaphor, compression wood does not keep still; in the environment of the mind, few things do. I considered the difference between McIver's world and my own, the difference between days spent handling wood and days spent handling paper. Both the wood and the paper came from trees, but only the wood reminded you of that fact. At the end of a day of sawing, you had a product - the trim, carefully organized stacks of lumber. This is what we have done since we became human - taken things out of nature and shaped them into a secondary environment for ourselves. McIver has always seemed to me to appreciate better than most what is lost and what is gained in the process. He might run his fingers over a fine plank. When the wood is first exposed to air, it is moist and smooth and alive. "The best finish you can put on good lumber will never make it look quite as pretty as it does when it's first cut," McIver says, "but that's what it should try to do. Otherwise, it's vandalism."
All I ever have to show for my work is paper: a paycheck at the end of the month, a grade sheet at the end of term, and, at erratic intervals, something printed somewhere. Not much sense of product there - nothing to stand back from, and wipe the sawdust of it off your hands, and admire.
Writing is in fact a mystery, an invention that grew out of the most mysterious and revolutionary human invention of all, which was language — the environment we inhabit and that inhabits us. Of all the secondary environments we have created, language seems the most like a natural system, something that grows, evolves, embraces, metamorphoses, and hybridizes according to laws that we can partially deduce but didn't devise and can't control. But when you are using it all the time, talking to yourself even when you are trying to listen to somebody else, language doesn't seem mysterious or revolutionary at all. It seems like self-generated static.
So it was a great satisfaction, as I drove back north, to try to picture McIver's world again, to replay the days on the sandy ridge. You'd watch the small saw travel through the log. You'd rotate the log a quarter turn with a cant hook, level it, and watch the saw go through again. You'd do this twice more. The lumpy, imperfect carcass of the log — tree trunks are far less straight and cylindrical than we imagine them to be — gives birth to solid geometry. It is not as though the tree were being dismembered. It is as though its innate idea, its inmost formal principles, were being elucidated.
There is something Greek about it, something out of Plato by way of Euclid and Pythagoras. Even after you'd spent a day lifting and lugging, an individual board could stop you short with its beauty - the wavering, flamelike fluency of the grain arrested by the severe, abstract symmetry of the plank.
Geometry and geography share the same root. Geometry came into · being because we needed to measure the earth, so that we could comprehend and claim our place on it. Speaking of the arts that created civilization, Yeats said very simply what seems to me very simply true: "Measurement began our might." From it came the pyramids, the Roman roads, the sciences of cartography, architecture, astronomy, mechanics, and so forth. And also, more obliquely, the measures of music and poetry, the power of aural, visual, and intellectual form over what Yeats called the "mere complexity" of experience. Ratio and rationality also come from a single root, suggesting that reason itself has to do with measured proportions and connects back, via geometry, to geography - the ground that is under our feet.
The plank that McIver unhappily examined and sentenced to the junk pile — that plank looks like the fly in the ointment. It conformed to standard dimensions but would not conform to standardized purposes. Like the other lumber, it seemed an expression of something innately Euclidean in a tree. But it also expressed something stubbornly local, peculiar to the particular life of that particular tree.
However much I might think of McIver by analogy to the plank of compression wood, he himself could afford to think of it only as he thinks of most things, unsentimentally and literally. The plank was of minimal utility; it might do for sheathing on a pigsty. But as I drove back north, back toward my own work, I found myself thinking of the plank in almost exactly the opposite way. In its lack of extrinsic or practical value, it resembled a work of art. Whatever value it had could only be intrinsic, generated by a rationale peculiar to itself, the outcome of a single organism's negotiation between the fixed reality in which it was rooted and the unpossessable light that it required. To make the process of my thinking much more conclusive and schematic than it actually was, I thought of the plank as a specimen of the kind of writing that gets called literature, of the tree as the writer who produced
Where you're from is never simply a matter of geography. It involves intersections of history, economics, family, and so forth, as well as the coordinates of latitude and longitude. Self-location, with or without maps, is ultimately as complicated and incomplete a process as self-knowledge. Something in us won't keep still. Geography gave us geometry; geometry gave us ratios and rationality, and rationality can remove us from the face of the earth, enabling us to live entirely in the secondary environments it creates. We can especially begin to live exclusively in the world of words, without even considering that that is what has happened. We sign checks and contracts, buy, sell, gossip, read the sports page, and think no more about language than we do about the boards in the floor under our feet. When it is taken for granted that way, language gets predictable, and because we live inside its walls, we begin to get the uneasy sense of being confined in a bland, elastic prison. In it, we seem to have words only for thoughts that have already been thought, and for emotions and perceptions that don't quite feel like our own.
I think that literature is made because some people find this state of affairs unwholesome and undertake to do something about it. The works that seem to have mattered and lasted seldom grow out of or reflect a life that is tranquilly organic and rooted; they are more likely to involve some sensation of displacement - of being out of place, or cut off from place, or imprisoned by place. The place that causes the discomfort isn't the actual geography. It is the atmosphere of assumptions that lies over it and seems to insulate us from it. What is assumed that way gradually becomes invisible.
It was these thoughts, which really began as just another kind of timber salvage, that eventually brought Hopkins to mind. I was not at that time thinking about his life - when you learn about a poet poems-first, the life can seem a shadowy sort of business that takes place backstage, a footnote to the poetry. As an advantaged and splendidly educated young Englishman, he started out as some thing of an aesthete, with a good deal of the snobbery and priggishness that are likely to accompany that stance. Maybe his conversion to Catholicism and his entry into the Jesuit order, while outwardly an attempt to conquer or at least to mortify that part of his nature, were in reality expressions of it. He does not appear to have ever truly escaped from himself and into his vocation. He no doubt struggled to love and serve his poor and mostly Irish parishioners and students in Liverpool and Dublin, but caritas, because it never wholly overcame his sense of genteel birth, his very English fastidiousness, winds up making those qualities in him seem especially unlovely, small, and sour. .
"Pied Beauty" hardly brings such a constricted, self-enclosed life to mind. One line from it came to me partway through Pennsylvania as I was mulling over the piece of compression wood: "All things counter, original, spare, strange." Those four adjectives that clash and echo against each other seemed to formulate what I had been fumbling toward, as I recalled the almost worthless plank of longleaf pine and the sawyer who sawed it. . . . .
Remembering the rest of the poem was harder. Like somebody struggling with a difficult crossword puzzle, I very imperfectly and provisionally filled in around that one line, and knew that I was missing some parts and misplacing others. It is good to have something like that to occupy your mind when you are driving, and I would not have looked up "Pied Beauty" if I'd had it on the seat beside me. But by the time I got home, I was ready to give in. I got the book down from the shelf, and there it was in its abrupt, contorted perfection, and here it is:
development I would not have seen when I was an undergraduate and knew almost nothing about what things I could and couldn't, would and wouldn't, leave behind me in Conway.
The poem starts with God and things — two thoroughly nondescript nouns from opposite ends of the metaphysical spectrum. The next three lines are all dappled things, images out of nature - skies, cow, trout, chestnuts, finches' wings. They are seen kaleidoscopically — disconnected and conflated and piecemeal all at once. This is hardly the expected, stable, and stabilizing view of Nature as an evidence of faith.
The sixth line now seems to me the true pivot of the poem, and it is a surprise. It isn't about natural things at all, but about the gear and tackle and trim of all trades, the creations of men, not of God. It appears to grow out of the line just before, when Hop kins is looking at the landscape. The landscape is pied and beautiful because of human intervention. It is plotted - divided into small plots, fields with different crops, hedgerows, and so forth; it looks pieced together, like a quilt. Fold, fallow, and plough add detail: a fold is an enclosure for keeping livestock; fallow is ground left out of cultivation; and plough, as it is used here, refers to tillage land, land that is ploughed and planted as opposed, for example, to pastures or orchards. But the word also suggests the actual im plement - the plough that does the ploughing - and that takes us to the line about the trades and their tools, almost as though those trades had grown up out of the earth itself.
Those trades show up in other poems by Hopkins. They are the manual trades of rural England - ploughing, blacksmithing, scything. One of the ways Hopkins freed himself from the Victorian nature poem was by watching and listening to the uneducated practitioners of these trades. The opportunity to do so may have been one of the few rewards of his difficult and unhappy choice of life. His poetry borrowed these people's tools and it borrowed their vocabulary, too — for example, the odd dialect word brinded in the second line. And perhaps it borrowed something larger and more basic. The people who used the tools fit McIver's definition of sanity - they were working with primary resources. They were at the point where human purpose and natural process encounter each other with some violence. The tools of the trade are sharp, sturdy, hot, and heavy; you can't handle them absentmindedly. I feel something analogous to that violence, that muscular strain and strife, in Hopkins's language, its brusque dismissal of traditional mellifluousness. This quality is what saves his poetry from conventional piety or conventional melancholy, and makes his poems in praise of God sudden and powerful, like momentary, ecstatic in versions of despair.
So the first half of the poem is all natural images until the sixth line, where we find the tools that convert natural creations into human ones. The second half of the poem has no images. It's virtually all adjectives. We leave the world of vivid perceptions and enter a world where language seems to generate itself. Fickle begets freckled by a recombination of consonants. Swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim are produced by logical opposition and alliteration. Observation has led to generalization; the things of this world have led us out of this world, into language. That is the development in the poem that I was able to see this time, its unintended plot. And that is, almost inevitably, the plot of much of what is loosely called nature writing, hard though nature writers try to avoid it.
And it was also pretty much the plot of my trip to South Carolina and back. In one way, its final point was the familiar one about how words always manage to lose most of the cargo they are sent to fetch and how your thought winds up chasing its own tail, while language once again builds up its wall around you.
But the world outside poems and essays - the world they come from and yearn toward - exists in its literal and unliterary processes, its power, and its indifference to whatever language may make or unmake of it. I can pick up the telephone on my desk and dial McIver's number. He has a phone; he now pays the bills. Even more remarkably, he also has an answering machine. It is necessary to his business. The voice that comes over the line isn't the least bit cordial: "You have reached the residence of Rod McIver. I am either unable or unwilling to answer the phone at present. Leave your message and a number where you can be reached." The machine was the cheapest one on the market, and he paid a little extra to get a free-replacement-at-absolutely-no charge guarantee for it. He renews the guarantee each time they have to replace the machine, and fears only that someday they'll give him one that will outlast its warranty. But thus far that hasn't happened, and he deals with his calls every week or so, when he comes in to sharpen his blades.
And so I know that he has traded - jettisoned would be more like it, he'd say - his truck, without discernible effect on his personality. He is through with the salvage job at the Santee Refuge now and is doing small contract jobs out in the county around Conway and in the neighboring counties. As an independent businessman, he is still going nowhere, at thirty-two feet per second per second. "I hope to hit the grave so hard I bounce," he says, quite cheerfully.
McIver's work can be agreeable in the early spring and late fall, and it's really best of all during bright winter weather. But you don't even want to think about what it's like from the middle of May until early October. The insects alone are enough to make you swear off fresh air forever. The heat builds up and bears down. It thrums inside your skull, like a bad fever. You get light-headed. The trunks of the pines across the clearing wobble and ripple in your sight, as though they, or your eyes, were actually melting.
The only thing for it is method, method. Every hour, McIver checks the coolant level in the saw. Then he pulls out his pocket watch and takes his pulse. If it's over 140, he stops, shuts off the saw, and clambers up onto the bed of the truck and lies down, a piece of cheesecloth over his face to keep off the bugs. He takes his pulse every three minutes. As soon as it drops out of the red zone, he clambers back down and prepares to restart the saw.
In the buzzing, dizzying glare, he moves slowly, ponderously, like a diver in his diving suit, sleepwalking through an atmosphere almost opaque with heat. The world can look strange then, as if it were in the process of growing unreal, sublimating itself into a mirage. You have to breathe carefully, and keep calm, and focus only on the task immediately in front of you, and not think about any future beyond the end of one more day, the completion of one more load of lumber. You cannot ask yourself what you are doing here, or why you are doing it, because those questions lack answers that would fit anybody's definition of sanity. You can only keep doing it, doggedly, deliberately, scrupulously, as though in obedience to something, or in honor of it.
At such times, I want to say to him that he is my last link to the point of origin, where originality must return to measure itself. But he is sun-stunned, a little addlebrained, and he fumbles at this. Fancy Dannery for a minute, trying to get his mind around it.
"Origin?" he asks. "Originality?" You can almost see the sluggish engine resisting the starter, churning heavily against its inertia. Finally it fires, coughs, catches, runs roughly at first, and then smooths out. The gears mesh and engage, and now the invincible aphorist is back in business. "The wages of originality is failure. Or maybe it's the other way around. I don't know. I don't care. Either way," McIver says to me, "I aim to get paid in full."