Current Issue: Spring/Summer 2011

Window  
Amy Newman

My writing room has always been the smallest room in the house. In our last house I settled in what had been a pantry off the kitchen; my current room is a storage closet off the bedroom. I can fit all I need anywhere. I moved so many times before I was twenty five that I developed an asceticism regarding material things, and could carry all my belongings in one Boy Scouts of America backpack from this house-sitting opportunity to that one. Too much property was too much to carry; while it's possible that I'd love to have a giant sun-washed room with a gigantic table, an immense expanse, I still deal in essentials whenever I can.

The only essential for the room is a window I can look through to see the yard, whatever yard it is, in its constant evolution of ducks, foxes, squirrels, rabbits, or deer that are, depending on the time of the year, thriving or scrounging or fighting for resources. The natural world's raw material is intense, and always filtered through one's imagination; “It is the poet's sense of the world that is the poet's world,” said Stevens, and my sense of the world is that we are just different iterations/translations of squirrel, fox, or deer. It seems coarse to insist that the really pretty yard and the lovely sun are not here for our pleasure, their beauty only diversions to us, not meant to entrance; such a remark opens up a very heavy door. As Richard Dawkins has said,“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so.” Within its suffering and death the natural world is also surprisingly transcendent and enduring; the window frame sometimes seems like a metaphor for my vision, which clicks in increments anytime a bird travels from one branch to the ground or rises up again.

Perception is the only filter. The mind's room—that is, one's version of things—takes in information like a factory, the raw materials of data, information, and news sent down conveyer belts of memory and mood, the mind's own mysterious workings, which shift, cleanse or stain it, affecting it in the same way as light transfigures one's sense of a room, or a jar influences a hill in Tennessee. The mind mixes versions of the world to a larger, ambitious sweetness, or breaks down complex ideas to simple sugars, like those field bees who return to a hive with collected nectar and, together with hive bees, process the nectar to honey. At once I see how my clumsy simile—comparing the mind's shaping process to the bee's honey production—flatters nature with sentimentality. The bee's industry is simply survival. And this statement, too, adjusting, correcting what I had earlier said, eliding the Romantic aspect of it, and forcing it toward its Naturalistic shape, is an example of my mind's industry, shaping the data through my sense of the world.

 

As a child I was walking with my father, a family friend Annette, and her son David, and we came upon two pigeons in the stages of mating: preening, cooing, tilting their heads. The male mounted the female, fluttering his wings and maneuvering, trying to maintain position on her within a vigorous storm of flapping and barking; it looked quite a bit like they were fighting. David was probably 5 at the time and I was maybe 6, and it was alarming to us. “What are the birds doing?' he cried out. Annette didn't hesitate, even while my father probably wondered for a moment how to respond. “They're making love, David,” she said.

My father was quietly delighted. “That is what they were doing,” he told my mother later while I played somewhere within earshot,” but I hadn't thought of it like that.” Annette ascribed to the birds a loving relationship, and this washed the world in a Keatsian fruitfulness, a Romantic transmutation, and now when I see animals in the yard, I sometimes think of her for a moment, before some of my other more vocal roommates, Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins, speak up.

 

In Dawkins' interview with Radiolab's Robert Krulwich, the two discuss Dawkin's daughter saying that flowers exist because they are pretty and to help the bees make honey. Dawkins had corrected her: “the flowers are not there to make the world beautiful, and they're not there to delight bees or anything else. They're in the world to copy their DNA.” Perhaps this is too much for a 6-year-old, Krulwich wonders, the possibility that “the world is a purposeless indifferent machine where the meaning of things is not clear, if it exists at all?” On the contrary, Dawkins replied, it was, for his daughter, “exciting...to understand what they're really doing.” In my head Annette and Dawkins and Darwin and my father and my family and any number of other visitors arrive and converse, argue and agree to disagree. So when I think of my true writing room, it's my mind I was really thinking of, my intellectual, rational faculty, located within my brain, I suppose. Its confines are a place of industry despite—or perhaps because of—this spatial limitation, its dimension, seemingly designed to suit my instincts, in the same way that the “bees that soar for bloom, High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells” find comfort, according to Wordsworth, in the foxglove bells of his sonnet, where they “will murmur by the hour.” Wordsworth was dissembling, of course; the bees murmur not in but among the foxglove bells, moving from bell to bell for resources to sustain them, wandering without dropping anchor anywhere. In nature, home is what sustains and is therefore always provisional.

Is it surprising that in trying to discuss a solid room I find myself again more interested in divesting myself of material things, looking instead for something incorporeal, the transubstantial quality of the imagination, as a place to live? “The brain is wider than the sky,” replies Dickinson. She probably remembers me from my wandering years, carrying everything in that tan backpack through various bus stations, moving from a garage where a cat had abandoned the runt of her litter there to die, to an apartment in Manhattan where another cat slaughtered a squirrel one morning, carrying it to a forsaken chair in the alley to feed herself and her kittens. The only squirrel left when I returned that evening was the tail and bits of pelt beside the feral cat family tired on the bloodstained cushion outside the window. It gave me very little pause. In New York that season, I was trying to survive under questionable circumstances, and the mice and rats, the cats and birds and squirrels of the city had the same cold, bony hunger I had. Like everything in the world, I was a transient and like the mother cat, I suppose, I got by on instinct and meager resources. The inessential evaporates in such cases, which is why I could carry my world in my backpack, and may be why the smallest room in any house is a good fit. But there must always be a window, that smooth, implied barrier that seems to frame the natural world, and keeps out the rain for now.

 

Amy Newman is the author of four poetry collections, including Fall (Wesleyan University Press, 2006) and Dear Editor, which won the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award and is forthcoming this year from Persea Books. Poems and essays appear recently in The Kenyon Review, Plougshares, Hotel Amerika, Center, and elsewhere. She is the Presidential Research Professor in the Department of English at Northern Illinois University.