|
Note
on
The Windows
Trees
are reflected in the house windows and make it look as if, from the
outside,
The house itself is full of forest veins.
I
imagine how trees might grow all through the house, how evidence of the
seasons will pass there, how I’ll see
...The high
buds
fritter. [And how] later
dead husks will brown,
form carpet, insulation, eiderdown.
Like
a child, I feel excited about the ‘reality’ of this topsy-turvy
looking-glass world of Nature inside the house.
I recall that (and this is not fiction)
... Once, a child somewhere,
I
thought a wood in an art gallery
led
to another hollow I might see.
It
was not in an art gallery but in St Barbara’s Church Hall, Caxton St,
Portsmouth, at a Sunday School, and what I saw was either scenery at the
back of the stage or a picture on the wall.
I thought I could walk into that picture, and this must have been
about 1936 when I was three.
I
next wonder about what other logic-defying, Alice-in-Wonderland
ambitions I might like to fulfil, concluding that they:
would
be to ravish Nature where she lies,
then
to cognise her algebraic laws.
To
be a sort of Titan copulating with Gaia, the Earth, is not a primitive
and dark urge, but an enlightened wish, the Romantic transcendentalist
desire to unite subject and object, to become one with Nature.
Not that I believe this is possible, but it’s a less harmful
belief than many. The other wish, to know Nature’s algebraic laws, is that of
the modern hierophant, the astrophysicist, and is just as extravagant
and doomed to failure—though I’m not against science, far from it.
The conclusion,
But
best would be to live with trees indoors...
returns
one to a more modest desire and I retreat into the childish desire to
run through the frame and into the picture.
Alan
Marshfield
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