At the Pavilion, Newport

 
Pavilions abound in this old whaling town.
This one ennobles a seaside park, a sward
with a marginal wood alive with Pearly Eyes,
the small satyr butterfly who roams the forests.

The columns of the pavilion are Tuscan, old
upright, and unfluted, as down by the seawall
a nautical legend holds a spyglass, one bronze
arm outstretched toward the mnemonic waves.

These smooth, calmest of columns embody ideas,
do they not: of law, devotion, order, strength,
of the true face we long to give the world.

And in their simplicity they show how light
will travel a surface from sunlit white to greys:
dove, charcoal, and into deepest shadow.

You can think about things in a stately pavilion.  
You’re expected to think about things here —
in a colonnaded space, with a serious sea nearby.

And so we ponder: could we come to live
on the earth as well as the small Pearly Eye?
Of course, it seems unlikely: as one of us

is small, short-lived creature with wings,
evolving coherently with its forest surround;
the other the sapien maker of unintended

consequences, of whom the ancient Greeks
were already using the word deinos, their word
for clever, awesome, uncanny, and fearful.

And in this are we not being being itself?
Eyes, ears – all fitted to the earth;
a recent apex in a wondrous world.

That being would risk a sapien creature for whom
experimentation is a natural act,
reveals how daring creation must be, at core.

A "venturing" Hölderlin called it. Open-ended,
neither rule-bound nor chaotic, Spinoza
said, but creative within evolving forms.
This he called Natura naturans.

An idea, Ernst Bloch notes, that "presupposes...
a notion of Natura abscondita, hidden
nature pressing for its own revelation.”

Thus "nature in its final manifestation
lies within the…future of those alliances
mediated through humanity” and being itself.  

To find future alliances, we can turn
neither to the pre-human planet for a script,
nor sanction all possible human doings:

the mediation is neither rule-bound, nor chaotic.
It must resemble “the…discipline of the artist
as described by Coleridge: ‘If the artist
copies mere nature, the Natura naturata,

what idle rivalry!...Believe me,’” the lake poet says,
’you must master the essence, the Natura naturans,
which presupposes a bond between nature…
and the soul” of a human being fully human.

First published in Green,1989; revised 2024
Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents at-a-Glance

GLOSSARY

natura naturans “There are, Spinoza insists, two sides of Nature. First, there is the active, productive aspect of the universe…from which all else follows. This is what Spinoza, employing the same terms he used in the Short Treatise, calls Natura naturans, ‘naturing Nature.’”
— Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2023

natura naturata — ”The other aspect of the universe is that which is produced and sustained by the active aspect, Natura naturata, ‘natured Nature.’ Nature is an indivisible, eternal or self-caused, substantial whole — in fact, it is the only substantial whole. Outside of Nature, there is nothing, and everything that exists is a part of Nature.” — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2023

natura abscondita — “Nature that is hidden…dwelling in inanimate matter.”