Another world? I can only think of Paradise, the one place I entirely remember, not as it was, but as it IS. (Surely it's the flawless imperfection of that rhyme — Paradise and Is — that explains so much for me: hummingbirds; clematis; the Rip van Winkle Bridge; Kerouac's drinking to the daytime reruns, The Beverly Hillbillies; and how, standing in the shower five minutes ago, I thought of my mother and of her soothing my father with baby powder while he died.) There's nothing else to think of. Paradise.

The first time I remember being there I was five years old and my father was driving. I've written about it.

When I was a boy, my father drove us once
very fast along a road deep in a woodland.
The leaves on the trees turned into mirrors
signaling with bright lights frantically.
They said it was the end of the world and to go faster.
                     
                         — "How Passion Comes to Matter"

We were in the Catskills. Suddenly, the road ahead and the woods around us turned brilliant bright pure white, but not blinding. My father kept driving. There were no cars but ours. After a while, my mother and sister and I began to chatter, at first frantically but then delightedly, about how beautiful the white forest and all the white leaves (this was middle July) and pine needles seemed in the perfect sunlight. It was clear to us all, though nobody said so, that we had somehow died and were motoring through Heaven now. Having no reason to slow down, my father drove faster and faster. After a few more minutes, the trees were just as suddenly green again and the two-lane blacktop asphalt black. We got home fine and had our supper.

I mean to find that stretch of road again. It would make things easy and save me a fortune in books and alcohol. All through my childhood, I looked for some precipice or hilltop from which I'd see the road and leap down into it. ("Like swimmers into cleanness leaping," as Rupert Brooke wrote one time — but I get ahead of myself, and of him.) No such luck. Not yet. But in the meantime, poetry, like the glitter of sunshine in a wine-cup on summer mornings, keeps me hopeful. I wasn't and I am not dreaming. Paradise isn't make-believe. I remember being so excited when, near the end of high school, I first read Rupert Brooke's "Dining Room Tea." Here are the first four stanzas.

When you were there, and you, and you,
Happiness crowned the night; I too
Laughing and looking, one of all,
I watched the quivering lamplight fall
On plate and flowers and pouring tea
And cup and cloth; and they and we
Flung all the dancing moments by
With jest and glitter. Lip and eye
Flashed on the glory, shone and cried,
Improvident, unmemoried;
And fitfully and like a flame
The light of laughter went and came.
Proud in their careless transience moved
The changing faces that I loved.

Till suddenly, and otherwhence,
I looked upon your innocence.
For lifted clear and still and strange
From the dark woven flow of change
Under a vast and starless sky
I saw the immortal moment lie.
One instant I, an instant, knew
As God knows all. And it and you
I, above Time, oh, blind! could see
In witless immortality.

I saw the marble cup; the tea,
Hung on the air, an amber stream;
I saw the fire's unglittering gleam,
The painted flame, the frozen smoke.
No more the flooding lamplight broke
On flying eyes and lips and hair;
But lay, but slept unbroken there,
On stiller flesh, and body breathless,
And lips and laughter stayed and deathless,
And words on which no silence grew.
Light was more alive than you.

For suddenly, and otherwhence,
I looked on your magnificence.
I saw the stillness and the light,
And you, august, immortal, white,
Holy and strange; and every glint
Posture and jest and thought and tint
Freed from the mask of transiency,
Triumphant in eternity,
Immote, immortal.

Like me, Rupert Brooke had been to Paradise in company. Of course, being in Europe, his Paradise was vertical, neo-Platonic if you will, and not a horizontal stretch of Catskills asphalt. And having been born in the 19th-century, he saw a stillness where I'd seen speed. ("Shall we & / why not, buy a goddamn big car..." Creeley's great poem remains a frantic tender Paradise too.) What mattered then, at the end of high school, and what matters still unstill to me is the co-incidence of a co-extensive Paradise: momentary but continuous; intermittent but eternal, at least so far. And who knows? Given the right poem or precipice (a great poem is a precipice), Paradise might become full-time.

In the meantime, there is the search for means of coping with Paradisiac nostalgia. How does one go forward with a memory of Paradise driving?

Le Paradis n' est pas artificiel
                                            but is jagged,
For a flash,
                  for an hour.
Then agony,
                   then an hour,
                                        then agony...

                   — Ezra Pound, "Canto XCII"

The intervals of Paradise — do they exalt or agonize? Does an absolute certainty of the reality of Paradise make our daily rigmaroles of imbecility and rapacity, ache and anomie more or less possible to bear? Always, it would seem, there is a choice to make — between a wild impatience and a sometimes even wilder willingness to bide. Less than a week before he died, Dylan Thomas gave apt, anguished expression to his own particular wilderness limit and love. Confiding to a friend, he said —

I want to go to the Garden of Eden... to die...

No poet of our time had a more vivid or more vivifying conviction of Eden's continuing access than did Dylan Thomas.

    And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
    With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
            Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
                    The sky gathered again
            And the sun grew round that very day.

                                                — "Fern Hill"

Yet clearly, evidence of Paradise may sustain a life even as it drives it wildly to an end. In "The First Century," Thomas Traherne avowed "Your enjoyment of the World is never right, till every Morning you awake in Heaven." It is that one word "every" that drives me crazy, just as I'm certain it drove Dylan Thomas to those eighteen straight whiskies that were the death of him. Having, alive, with eyes wide open, witnessed the renovation by Paradise of common Day one day, or even often, what about another? What happens when I wake wrong and do not enjoy the world aright? There is always the great escape, the wild impatience. Too, there is one or another lesser precipice, a little while longer in the wilderness of poems, of pictures, of baseball with the kids, white wine in the morning instead of whiskey. My life is mostly a little wild abiding. One time last year I was at loose ends and lonely in Chicago. I'd read my poems to some lovely people and had another day to spend before I could go home. I went to the Art Institute where I saw so many heavenly pictures (one of them a Catskills landscape, so very, very close), it almost made me frantic. And then I turned a corner into a small room, one entire wall of which was taken up by an enormous Vuillard — "Foliage-Oak Tree & Fruit Seller—at the Closeries des Genets, Vaucresson." In the lower left hand corner of the canvas, a little girl bends down through blue-green shade to touch a white kitten. I sat on the floor in front of the picture, and I watched the kitten and the girl for a whole half hour. A lesser precipice, such as Hart Crane showed, a "kitten in the wilderness."

I know a Paradise when I see one, because I've seen one. The trick is now to see another till I see One again.

American Letters & Commentary

Editor: Anna Rabinowitz
Fiction Editor: Eric Darton
Poetry Editor: Matthea Harvey
Art Director: Sasha Wizansky
Editorial Assistant: Penelope Cray

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The Self-Dismembered Man — Paperback

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