by Dr. Ian Kluge
In "The Walk in the Garden", Conrad Aiken portrays life as a walk or "a voyage" (ii, 18) comprised of three stages, each characterized by a distinct form of consciousness which depends on and includes the previous phase. Like Hegel’s dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, this process never ends, since the last step of every cycle becomes the first step of the next. An end is always a new beginning.
Part I of "The Walk in the Garden" represents the ‘now-here’ stage of the journey. The narrator, walking through a May garden, contemplates the various beauties of plants and trees in blossom. His language, however, soon makes it clear that his thoughts are not limited to appreciation:
Noting in slow sequence by the waterclock of rain
or dandelion clock of sun
the green hours of trees and white hours of flowers:
annotating again the ‘flower glory of the season
a book that is never done’, never done:
(I, 1-5; italics added)
The unusual phrase, "waterclock of rain" ( i,1) not only alerts us to expect more than an ordinary poem of nature appreciation, but also suggests that "The Walk in the Garden" is going to be about time, and, by extension, the passage of time or, process. Phrases like "dandelion clock" (i,2) and "the green hours of trees’ (i,3) reinforce this impression. These suggestions help prepare the way for the image of life as a walk or journey.
While the repetition of the phrase "never done" (i,5) clearly supports the notion that time, change and process are important in our understanding of this poem, the key metaphor introduced in Part I is that of nature, the world, as a book. The narrator thinks of the plants as words, referring to them as "phrases of green-white" (i,6) and says that while walking through the garden, he is, in fact, "interpreting these, translating these" (I, 10), and "poring over these pages of white thought"(I, 16). By ‘interpretation’ the narrator means that he - and we - inevitably put our own personal stamp on everything we perceive, for we perceive everything in our own way. Perceptions are, in fact, also self disclosures or self-revelations and thus, in our walk in the garden, we read both ourselves and the contents of the world.
Repetition of the phrase "it is here" (i,10; I, 15) helps locate this stage of development in the here and now. It also invites us to experience fully the beauties of the place and season through some of the narrator’s striking descriptions, such as "the silent galaxies of bloom"(i,9), "the seven-branched tree, where bees/ Stir the stars" (I, 13-14) and the "lost snows of another December" (I, 20). These, as well as the teasingly curious references to the world as a book, indeed, an "immortal book" (I, 25) encourages us to look more closely at what is happening in the present moment. The narrator’s use of "we" (i,17; I, 23; i,2) shows that he would like us to join him in this special moment of imagined time and that, in effect, his journey will also be ours.
Perhaps the most teasing phrase used in Part i is the reference to the "solar sum"(i,8) added by "the ancient lyre-tree [and] the ancient plum"(i,7). These lines are typical of Aiken’s word play at its profound best. How appropriate - in view of nature being characterized as a book - that the tree is a "lyre-tree" (ibid) with its allusion to lyres, poetry, music and, for some readers at least, Orpheus, the archetypal poet.
Far more complex, however, is the pun on the word "sum" which has arithmetical
as well as a philosophical connotations. Arithmetically, the tree is an
addition to the beauties of the world. Philosophically, the word "sum"
recalls Descartes "Cogito, ergo sum" which opens a new line of thought,
namely, that in its own way, each blossoming tree - and, by extension,
every thing - expresses the entire "I am", the being, of the entire universe.
Each thing is, in fact, a summation of the universe at that particular
time and place; it sums up the universe in itself and, thereby, expresses
the being of the universe in a unique way.
However, because the word "sum" in its Latin meaning of "I am" implies
a conscious sense of being, Aiken’s pun is far more than a clever way of
reviving the traditional notions of microcosm and macrocosm. This pun suggests
that in some way or another, the universe itself has a consciousness of
its own being, that it is not the inert, lifeless thing so often
imagined by some. After all, if the world is a book, then the things in
it are words - which by their very nature are far more than mere marks
on a page. Words make meaning possible, and these meanings become fully
conscious in man, in the reader and interpreter of the world book, who
is himself one of the world’s "sums". In short, man is the consciousness
of the world and all that man does and thinks is part of the world’s own
evolution. This fact lends cosmic significance to the "walk in the garden",
because the walk is no longer a mere walk and nothing more; it is part
of the process in which - through man, the interpreter, through us
- the universe achieves new insight and understanding of itself.
Appropriately enough, Part ii of the poem begins the ‘nowhere’ phase of the walk on a note of uncertainty:
Shall we call it, then, the walk in the garden?
the morning walk in the simple garden? But only if by this we mean
everything!
(ii,1-3)
The seemingly impossible requirement of including "everything" (ibid)
alerts readers that far more is at stake than a simple walk, although Aiken’s
strikingly beautiful descriptions of nature would make such an experience
inherently worthwhile. The narrator reinforces this suggestion when he
says that the walk might just as well be called
the voyage in the garden, too, for so it is:
the long voyage home, past cape and headland
of the forgotten or remembered: the mystic signal
is barely guessed in the spiderwort’s golden eye, recognized
tardily, obscurely, in the quick bronze flash
from the little raindrop left to wither
(ii.18-23; italics added)
A "voyage", of course, connotes something far more grand and important
than a walk and when he calls it "the long voyage home"(ibid) he cannot
help but allude to the greatest of all voyages home, Homer’s Odyssey,
which would cast him - and us - in the role of Odysseus. The inevitable
questions about where and what home is, and the identity of our own ‘Penelope’
will receive a startling answer by the end of the poem. These lines
also make it clear that the walk or journey takes places simultaneously
in the beautifully described external garden and internally, in the mind,
as the narrator sails "past cape and headland / of the forgotten or remembered"
(ii,19-20). In effect, there are two journeys, and the more important
is the second, the unseen internal mental and/or spiritual voyage whose
existence is often "barely guessed" (ii,21), at, and too often known to
us only "tardily"(ii,22) and "obscurely" (ibid). Few possess clear
awareness of this inner voyage to greater consciousness of themselves:
...For in this walk, this voyage,
it is yourself, the profound history of your ‘self’
that now as always your encounter.
(ii, 25-27)
As already noted, the reason we always encounter ourselves is simple: moving through the world, we inevitably interpret what we perceive, and these interpretations manifest our personality, our selves. Every interpretation is an evaluation insofar as we choose what matters to us and what does not, and how and why it matters. In so doing, we reveal our inner, often hidden, nature in what, superficially, are seemingly purely factual encounters with the contents of the external world. Consequently, the history of our lives can be read in the histories of our perceptions and interpretations of what we encounter. These personalizations and self-disclosures are inescapable, or, as the narrator says, "These waiting histories will have their say" (ii,43).
Reflection on Part ii leads to the conclusion that the narrator does not really know ‘where’ he is. He knows his whole life is a voyage in which he interprets the events of his inner and outer existence just as he interprets the flowers and trees in the external garden. He also knows that these interpretations and understandings have evolved as he himself has evolved so that, in effect, the history of his interpretations is the history of his own growth, development, his own voyage or progress. However, like a navigator who knows his latitude but not longitude, the narrator does not yet know precisely ‘where’, how far along he is in the journey of his life. He lacks the complete map and, therefore, could be anywhere, or conversely, nowhere.
Part iii, reveals just how lost the narrator feels. In the first phase of this part, he starts with a challenging thought: if the events of his inner and outer life are interpretations can this also be said of the ‘small’, ordinary, even trivial things that have touched his existence - or is only selecting the seemingly easy and significant aspects of life for interpretation?
But of those other trifles, the too intrusive,
the factual, the actual, that are too intrusive
too near, too close, too gross, for deeper meaning:
what of these, what will memory make of these?
Will these too yield to the magic of translation?
The bobby-pins, the daily news, the paper-clips, even
the stuffed two-headed calf once seen in a pawnshop window;
(iii, 1-7)
Because he senses that something vital is missing, he belabors this thought with extraordinary intensity, fearful no doubt, that he is unable to meet his own challenge:
how will you profitably rehearse these,
how will you (otherwise than here!) rehearse these and to what end
of reconstruction? for what inspired interpretation
of the lost image, the lost touch?
(iii, 13-16)
He understands all too clearly that he cannot truly know ‘where’ in his journey he is if he cannot interpret, that is, understand, even these simple things in his life. However, to do that, he needs more than the common-place factual knowledge available in the first, ‘now-here’ phase of this poem:
Useless here, the immediate, the factual, the actual:
(iii, 17)
Factual knowledge is no longer sufficient: "the telephone remains silent when most you wish to hear it" (iii, 8). His heart, like "the May morning" (iii,19) "remains empty, infertile" (iii,20) precisely because, like any navigator, he needs a complete map, or, as he says "a vision" (iii, 22) so that he may ‘know-where’ he really is.
In the second phase of Part iii, the narrator rejects a solution that he once accepted, namely, satisfaction with the mere fact of change itself as accidental events, and
meaningless impromptus
the angelic-not-you should open the door
and angelically enter to take slow possession
of the room, the chairs, the walls the windows
(iii, 32-35)
He was once satisfied with the pleasurable mysteries of change brought about by the arrival of novelty and strangeness in his life, for at that time he felt strangeness possessed
the divine touch that in the radiant fingertips
could at once create, with a magician’s eloquence,
nothing from something, or something from nothing:
as, out of the untouched piano
a shabby chord...
(iii, 39-43)
The arrival of the strange, the "angelic not-you" (iii,33) no longer
enchants him
with its power of transforming all things by altering their context
and, thereby, revealing them in a new way:
but no, these are all a broken imagination only,
for the one and only heart remains lonely
(iii, 53-4)
His heart wants something more than an endless parade of changes no
matter how dazzling they might be.
Unable to experience emotional and spiritual satisfaction in the ability to lose himself in the pleasurable and bedazzling transformations of even the "ridiculous trifles" (iii, 56) that comprise the ‘now-here’, he finds himself lost in a dreary ‘no-where’. He needs something constant and utterly reliable - a "one and only" (iii, 54) - in order to continue his personal evolutionary journey. In short, the narrator has passed beyond an almost valueless, nihilistic immersion in the pleasures of the ever-changing present to a stage in which he requires a vision, a plan or, in terms of his allusions to The Odyssey, a map.
This vision or map comes to him almost by accident:
Only, in the thinking hands, for a moment
the persistent stupid bloodstream vaguely traces -
as if on air, as if on air -
the lost touch, the lost image, the chimerical future:
praying, now, for the illusion of a abstract love.
(iii, 58-62)
How lost the narrator really feels and how unexpectedly the revelation comes to him is shown in his sudden pauses, and repetitions; he speaks as if caught off-guard and were still struggling to find the right words for his experience. Indeed, at this moment it seems as though his body, his blood, his hands - not his mind - were thinking and acting for him, forming themselves in a gesture of prayer for something he still seems to consider a falsehood: "the illusion of an abstract love" (iii, 62; italics added). He is so surprised by this unexpected gesture that he remains in doubt as to whether it is, or refers to, anything real. However, unsought for and mysterious as it might be - what, after all, is "abstract love" (ibid)? - the experience is sufficiently forceful to propel him into the third, ‘know-where’ phase of his development.
In Part iv, the ‘know-where’ phase of this three-fold dialectical evolutionary movement unfolds as the narrator’s consciousness returns to the garden with his vision enriched by all that he has experienced, remembered and realized. How radically he has been changed by the sudden experience is shown by the fact that he now questions what he had previously asserted:
The illusion of an abstract love? Say, rather
it was the loves and hates that were illusion,
and all that accompanied them; items of fatigue
or of dubious regret. denials and acceptances,
these it is that are as clouds
(iv,1-5)
Not only is he willing to question his previous views about the illusory
nature of "abstract love" (ibid), but he also asserts that his particular,
supposedly real "loves and hates"(ibid) in the past are illusory, unreal,
"as clouds" (ibid). He has unquestionably abandoned the ‘now-here’
stance he initially took in Part I . Because his particular "loves
and hates" (ibid) have all perished , "gone deathward over the morning"
(iv, 6) he can do no more than remember them, that is, abstract them "out
of space" (iv,9) and "out of time"(ibid) and, finally, re-create
them as poetry. He must imaginatively re-create, that is, "reset"
(iv,10) them "in crystal rhyme" (iv,11). In so doing, he will, at last,
find an abstract point of view beyond particular time and place from which
he can discern the pattern that is not only more real than any individual
details of his life but which is also more inclusive, that is, loving.
In the religious language suggested by using the word "prayer", the narrator
believes that through imagination and poetry he can discern the inclusive
and eternal pattern of his life from an abstract, ‘God’s-eye’ point of
view. In poetry he will find "that abstract love" (iv, 17)
wherein all things become imperishable mind:
the numberless becomes the one, the brief becomes everlasting,
...
evil is fixed and quiet as a tree or hill
but all alike acceptable and one
and in one pattern made to move, or not to move,
by the illusion if it is illusion,
of an abstract love.
(iv, 18-27; italics added)
This pattern, this complete vision of his life, which allows him to include as "acceptable" (iv,24) all aspects of his existence including evil and "violence" (iv, 22) is, therefore, the map he requires to know his location in his voyage of self and world discovery. This vision resolves the contradictions of the many and the one, of the eternal and temporal, of the human and divine points of view and the now-here, no-where and know-where. They are all present in the master pattern of his life. The pattern, of course, is also the goal of his voyage, the "home" (ii, 19) which he originally sought and where he can, at last, find some sort of permanence, stability and rest. As well, this pattern is the Penelope to whom he, the Odysseus-like voyager returns for peace and comfort.
The narrator is back in the garden where he started but, despite the enrichment of his understanding and interpretation, his peace is not destined to last long. As with Hegel’s dialectic, the last, culminating phase becomes the first step in a renewed voyage of self and world discovery. It is impossible to complete this exploration and interpretation of self and the world:
Touch now again the serpent skin of the lyre-tree:
stoop now again, a hummingbird
to the magic of the mock-orange;
count again by waterclock of rain
or dandelion clock of sun
the slow days of tree, the quick hours of flowers;
this time, this matin-song, this love is yours, is ours
a book that is never done, never done.
(iv, 28-35;italics added)