So often we talk of bringing things to light, as if light itself were the highest good, as if illumination were the very soul of our being ensouled. We seek the light, whether it's at the end of a tunnel, clarity in an idea, or just pointing out the path to a glass of water, late at night in the kitchen. In a more philosophical mood we entertain how existence itself is like the flashing out of a light that in turn offers us companionship among all that becomes visible through it. Light, in this sense, is what makes us real, or, at the very least, lets us assume we are so for the time being.
So why dawdle in the shade?
We are strange creatures. For the fact of our existence is not in the first instance obvious to us, even if retrospectively the affirmation of it seems fairly incontrovertible. In the beginning, then, we are not so much in the light as in the shade, although, ironically, without any sense of its being shade.
Engaging in the chemical magic of photosynthesis, a plant drinks in a broad swath of the spectrum of visible light and leaves us to witness the leavings of that light, which is to say its greenness. Paradoxically, green light is not invited into the plant's living tissues, but instead is reflected outward into the surrounding world. We understand the plant to be green, the plant understands itself to be all but that. When a plant is feeling generous, or in need of a visit from another living kind, other colors projected outward can be involved. But they are divvied up into bits and drabs, even if these are often intense and so compellingly attractive to one living thing or another upon which the plant depends for various ecological services. But the green remains in the main, because green light is unneeded for the maintenance of a plant's life.
Still, in a certain frame of mind, in a certain moment of poetic reverie, the greenness of plants is all. Such a moment meets the reader of Andrew Marvell's
"The Garden." A phrase from that poem has always stuck in my mind, namely, "green thoughts in a green shade." Whatever Marvell might have meant by those words, they have become for me a mantra, a guiding sentiment for delight in the world entered into, when one is immersed in the company of plants. People speak of "forest bathing, and certainly part of the power of that practice has to do with drinking in through one's eyes, the greenness of phytological beings fully alive.
But what after all did Marvell mean by this particular set of words, reverberating down the centuries, often loosened from the context in which they were first brought to light? This question recently brought me back to Marvell's poem, to renew my acquaintance with the circumstances in which his artfully coined phrase emerges.
What I found was a bit surprising. Green thoughts in a green shade were ghostly ones for Marvell, but in an odd way. These ghosts, it turns out, involved the imagination's play with the sensations of living things as they made their way into the mind to be cultivated there in another sort of garden altogether than that located in the world outside. In the outer world, feasting on melons and ripe apples, nectarines and the "curious peach," not to mention a good measure of fermented grapes, the poet collapses in pleasure to the ground, "ensnared" as he puts it, in the grass.
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find,
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.
This turn inward reminds me of Augustine, of how the creatures in Book 10 of his Confessions speak to him but, in doing so, implore him to search out the depths of his own soul so that he might inquire into their, as well as his own, Creator. The creatures are curiously dependent upon human reflection to make sense of their reality. But with Marvel this turn inward is not so much about a search for the Most High, as it is a confrontation with the powers of the human mind to rework the real of the ordinary world into more intense, more compelling realities, ones that ironically "annihilate all that's made to a green thought in a green shade."
Marvel's words leave me with this discomforting metaphysical question: Is anything real at all? To be human, let alone to be a human poet is not a simple thing, surely. But for Marvel the drama is compounded by how the mind is not a still pond into which the world is confidently reflected, but a storm-ridden ocean, from whose depths new worlds, or at least new versions of the shared and common world, precipitously arise. Where even to look for the reality of an earthly thing within that tempest-tossed realm that is one's own soul? Likely Marvell goes too far in claiming for humans the capacity of a god to pull out from the hat of nothingness, rabbit after rabbit and world after world. Still, we humans seek the company of green shades on a regular basis, and we do so to loosen our ties to a more ordinary, a more mundane world. What comes of that, who is to say? At the very least, another poem. Or in my case, another image of the greenness of green things encountered along the paths I have been recently walking, camera in hand.
