POEMS
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
and upright, 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 classical pavilion.
You’re expected to think about things here —
in a colonnaded space, with a serious sea nearby.
For discussion: Could we come to live on the earth
as well as the Pearly Eye? Naturally, it seems unlikely:
one of us a 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 uncanny, clever, awesome, fearful.
True enough, yet in this are we not being
being itself? Eyes, hands all fitted to the earth;
a recent apex in a wondrous world.
That being would risk a sapien 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, the hidden nature
pressing for its own revelation.
Thus "nature in its final manifestation lies within the…
future of those alliances mediated through
humanity” and nature, or being itself.
To identity the future alliances, we can
neither turn to the pre-human Earth for a script,
nor sanction all possible human doings:
the mediation is neither rule-bound, nor chaotic.
The mediation must resemble the…discipline
of the artist as described by Coleridge:
"If the artist copies the 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 in the highest sense
and the soul” of a human being fully human.
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.”
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