Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature - Softcover

Davenport, Guy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1582430357 ISBN 13: 9781582430355

Publisher: Counterpoint, 1999

Synopsis

This collection of four essays on the art of the still life begins with a look back to pictures of meals painted on the walls of Egyptian tombs--as the author points out, the soul could eat. Davenport’s meditations on the still life dip into the full history of this art form, touching on neolithic cave paintings, the Dutch masters, Cezanne, Van Gogh, even photography and the collage.

About this title

About the Author

Guy Davenport was a writer, illustrator, teacher, and scholar. He is best known for his modernist-style short stories, but his range of works is wide, spanning poetry, translation, and criticism. He was a professor of English for three decades, having taught at Haverford College and the University of Kentucky.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Objects on a Table

Harmonious Disarray in Art & LiteratureBy Guy Davenport

Counterpoint Press

Copyright © 1999 Guy Davenport
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781582430355

Chapter One

A BASKET OF SUMMER FRUIT

    Between the gathering of food and its consumption there isan interval when it is on display. To this arrangement ofeggs on the sideboard, as may be, brought in from thehenhouse (in Tuscany in the time of Horace, in the South Carolina of mychildhood, in Yorkshire, in Normandy), apples and pears from the orchard,a string of fish from the river, a brace of partridges flecked withblood, a basket of squash and beans from the garden, the Dutch gave thename still life around the middle of the seventeenth century. A. P. A.Vorenkamp tells us in his history of Dutch still life that the word comesfrom the jargon of painters: leven, "alive," for drawings made from amodel. A vrouwenleven was a female model, and one who, from time totime, while posing, needed to move; a stillleven--fruit, flowers, orfish--remained still. This was a general term, used by painters and dealers.People who fancied still life for their walls, of whom there were more inRenaissance Netherlands than at any other time in history, used suchdesignations as ontbijt, breakfast or snack; banket, by whichthe Dutch mean not only our banquet but a copious array of pastries; or thesumptuous pronkstillleven, an ostentatious table such as Chaucer givesthe Franklin, who was "Epicurus owene sone":

His breed, his-ale, was alweys after oon;
A bettre envyned man was nowher noon.
Withoute bake mete was nevere his hous,
Of fissh and flessh, and that so plentevous,
It snewed in his hous of mete and drynke,
Of alle deyntees that men koude thynke.
After the sondry sesons of the yeer,
So chaunged he his mete and his soper.
Ful many a fat partrich hadde he in muwe,
And many a breem and many a luce in stewe.
Wo was his cook but if his sauce were
Poynaunt and sharp, and redy al his geere.
His table dormant in his halle alway
Stood redy covered al the longe day.

    The pronkstillleven, as we shall see, can be used to voluptuous ends,as by Keats in "The Eve of St. Agnes," or to joyous ones, as withDickens's Christmas feasts, or comic ones, as with the grand spreads laidout by Thomas Love Peacock's epicurean squires and eccentrics, or toelaborately symbolic ends, as with Joyce in "The Dead" or Edgar AllanPoe--with another kind of pronkstillleven, of philosophical and poeticemblems such as we find in Holbein's Ambassadors and Durer'sMelencolia. Epicurean, let us note, has its own history as a kind oftable fare. Historically it should mean the simple meal of a philosopher ofadmirable restraint: an actual meal of Epicurus comes down to us--goatcheese, plain bread, and a pitcher of cold spring water--equaled, perhaps,by Milton's heroic late-night refreshment of a pipe of tobacco anda glass of cold water. But "Epicurean" turned into the sense the Arabicword from which his name derives still has, bikouros (especially used byMoroccans of the Anglican clergy), high living and rich eating.

    Still life begins in history at two points, in Egypt and in Israel,establishing two themes that will persist in unbroken tradition until our time.

    Primitive peoples feed their dead. In the most ancient of graves wefind dishes and cruses. From the earliest times that we know of in Egypt,food was given by pious offspring to their deceased parents: the ka, orsoul, could eat. Its hieroglyph is that prehistoric and lasting gesture ofpraise, uplifted arms. And when, after a long time, there was no morefamily to feed actual food to an ancestor, there was a picture of a mealpainted on the tomb wall, and the ka could survive on that until thecoming forth by day of Osiris, when time will stop, and the righteousdwell forever in the eternal July of the redeemed Egypt.

    That, it seems to me, is the real root of still life--an utterly primitiveand archaic feeling that a picture of food has some sustenance. Somethingclose to this idea must have been behind the neolithic cave paintings,which almost invariably depict animals. All the theories makesense: that these animal images were drawn in the earth's womb toenhance fertility; that the image was identified magically with the animal,and that to slay the image would ensure slaying the animal; or amore engaging theory, that the images were restorations of slain animals,an offering to some god of a replacement of a part of his creation thatwe, to stay alive, have had to kill and eat.

    Whatever the truth of picturing food, the reasoning will have transmuted,culture by culture, over the millennia. Franz Kafka tells us thisparable:

Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what
was in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over
again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and becomes a
part of the ceremony.

    In the study of still life, we must be prepared for leopards that havebecome a part of the ceremony. Still life persists for four thousand years,and deserves study for that alone. The portrait arises and falls away, oris forbidden, or loses significance (as in our times). Landscape isintermittent--we rarely find it even in descriptions. Pausanias describedGreece without a single view of meadow or wood, riverbank or mountain.All the genres of painting except still life are discontinuous, andonly the lyric poem, or song, can claim so ancient a part of our cultureamong the expressive arts.

    The other beginning of still life, as a subject, is in the Book of Amos.A prophet of the eighth century B.C., Amos was a contemporary ofJeroboam the Second (783-741), after whose reign the kingdom of Israelfell into confusion and collapse. Amos, a dresser of sycamore trees anda shepherd, was given a vision by God. At Amos 8:1-2,

Thus hath the lord GOD shewed unto me, and beholde, a basket
of summer fruit. And he said, Amos, what seest thou?
And I sayde: a basket of summer fruit. Then said the LORD
unto me, The ende is come upon my people of Israel; I will
not again pass by them any more.

    The King James translators put as their rubric in the margin: "By abasket of summer fruit, it is shewed the propinquitie of Israel's end."

    Vanitas vanitatem and memento mori: a still life becomes asymbol of what we shall have taken from us, though at the moment it is a signof God's goodness and the bounty of nature.

    "Hear this," said Amos, "O ye that swallow up the needy, even tomake the poor of the land to fail, saying, When will the new Moone begone, that we may sell corne? and the Sabbath, that we may set forthwheat, making the ephah small, and the shekel great, and falsifying thebalances by deceit? that we may buy the poor for silver, and the needyfor a pair of shoes ...?"

    To the vision of the basket of summer fruit the Lord adds one ofHimself upon a wall made by a plumb line, with a plumb line in Hishand.

And the LORD said unto me, Amos, what seest thou? And I
sayd, a plumbline. Then sayd the Lord, Behold, I will set a
plumbline in the midst of my people Israel, I will not again
pass by them any more. And the high places of Isaac shall be
desolate, and the Sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste: and
I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword.

    Plumb line, anakk; grief, anaqah. Summer fruit,qayits, an ending, qaits. We shall see that the still life likespuns and double meanings, as in Amos's rhetoric.

    If greed, rapacity, and selfishness are the opposite of the grace of abasket of summer fruit, Amos gives us one of the most beautiful ofhyperboles at the end of his book, where he describes what might be, iftwo walk together and be agreed, and man and God walk together.

Behold, the daies come, saith the LORD, that the plowman
shall overtake the reaper and the treader of grapes him that
soweth seede, and the mountains shall drop sweet wine, and
all the hills shall melt. And I will bring againe the captivitie of
my people of Israel; and they shall build the waste cities and
inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the
wine thereof; they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit
of them. And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall
no more be pulled up out of their land, which I have given
them, saith the LORD thy God.

    That is, the basket will again be full of summer fruit. We can see thatbasket--filled with apples, pears, and figs--in Roman mosaics when theempire was at its most orderly and majestic; we can see it in the greatrenaissance of still life in the Netherlands after the expulsion of the Spanishand while the Dutch were refining the art of living to a high degree. We cansee it in nineteenth-century American painting as a celebration of the land'sgoodness.

    Still life is a minor art, and one with a residue of didacticism that willnever bleach out; a homely art. From the artist's point of view, it hasalways served as a contemplative form useful for working out ideas,color schemes, opinions. It has the same relation to larger, more ambitiouspaintings as the sonnet to the long poem. Petrarch, Wyatt, Shakespeare,Milton, Donne, Hopkins--the sonnet is their study book andtheir confessional, their meditative form. It is easy to see that still life hasbeen a kind of recreation, a jeu d'esprit, for painters. Manet painting abunch of asparagus is a man on holiday, like Rossini and Mozart havingfun writing comic songs, or Picasso doodling on a tablecloth.

    We must not, however, imagine that still life is inconsequential ortrivial. Composers work out ideas in string quartets--Beethoven's andBartok's experimental forms for discovering what can be done with harmoniesand tempi--that have become masterpieces. There are artistslike Chardin and Braque for whom still life was their major form ofexpression, as there are poets who have excelled only in the sonnet andthe short lyric.

    That the kinship of still life with still life down through history isgreater than that of landscape with landscape, or portrait with portrait,lies at the center of its mystery. A Roman landscape in mosaic on thewall of a villa, with its archaic placement of trees and figures, its totallack of perspective, is a vision radically different from a medieval landscapewith its toy charm and fidgety business (the woodcutter paying noattention to David carrying off Goliath's head; a fisherman in his boat inthe river equally indifferent), or a Poussin, or a description by Proust ofthe meadows around Balbec. But a Roman mosaic of a basket of applesand pears, as in the Vatican's tessellated floor, is wonderfully like basketsof apples and pears of all ages. There is the same nakedness of presentation,the same mute hope of and confidence in the clarity of the subject,a tacitness so deep that we may never get to the bottom of it.

    Reiteration is a privilege of still life denied many other modes. Turner'slandscapes and interiors begin and end with Turner, not becausegenius does not repeat but because Turner's time, its spirit and perspectivesin history, cannot repeat itself. Turner's wave of time was strong,percussive, and grand, but it was short. Still life belongs in the slowsinews of a great swell that began with the cultivation of wheat and thefermentation of wine, bread and wine being two of its permanentimages. It is an art that is symbiotic with civilization. We must supposethat man in his most primitive state ate like a beast, selfishly and whenhe could.

    Claude Levi-Strauss in his tetralogy Les Mythologies argues that inpreparing food for communal consumption, by cooking, by symbolicunderstanding of the ritualness of eating, and by the evolution of tablemanners, we crossed over from the wild to the tame, from nature to culture.Certainly the placing of food on an altar to do honor to a god,which is one of the instigations of all still life, is an obvious passage fromsavagery to civilization, which the Bible locates at the beginning of timealready differentiated into the hunter's and the farmer's sacrifice.

    In Christ's ministry the table figures as a versatile symbol throughoutthe Gospels, from the wedding feast of the first miracle to the LastSupper, the bread and wine of which became fixed in European still life,along with other Christian symbols, such as the apple and the pear,which would not go away in the most gaudy Dutch still lifes, or in cubiststill lifes, where, on the contrary, they asserted themselves with newvigor.

    "Still life" first comes into English in Dryden and Graham's translation(1695) of Dufresnoys's De Arte Graphica, or The Art of Painting:"His peculiar happiness is expressing all sorts of Animals, Fruit,Flowers and the Still-Life." By 1701 the meaning seems to have narrowedin English to mean trompe l'oeil, and in 1762 we find HoraceWalpole looking down his nose and writing, "He painted still-life,oranges and lemons, plate, damask curtains, cloths of gold, and thatmedley of familiar objects that strike the ignorant vulgar," from whichwe gather that the knowing had become bored with the Dutchpronkstillleven. In the third century B.C., by the way, there is a mimeof Herondas in which he satirizes pretentious women for admiring thelife-likeness of paintings without understanding a great deal of what theywere about:

That naked boy there, look, I could pinch him
And leave a welt. His warm flesh is so bright
that it shimmers like sunlight on water.
And his silver fire tongs; wouldn't Myllos
send his eyes out in stalks in wonderment,
or Lamprion's son Pataikiskos try
to steal them! For they are indeed that real!
The ox, the herd, and the girl who's with them,
the hook-nosed man with his hair sticking up,
they are as real as in everyday life.
If I weren't a lady, I might scream
at the sight of that convincing big ox
watching us out of the side of his big eye.

    Here is a sixth-century B.C. Greek table, described in an elegy byXenophanes of Colophon:

The floor is clean, and all our hands, and the cups.
A slave puts garlands of flowers on our heads,
another passes around myrrh in a flat dish, for perfume.
The mixing bowl and a jar of wine as sweet as honey
and smelling of flowers sits in our midst.
The room is scented with frankincense, and the springwater
for the wine is cold, fresh and pure.
Loaves of bread seem golden, and there is honey and cheese.
There is a bouquet of flowers on the altar in the center.

    Xenophanes goes on to say that the meal begins with songs, prayers,and a libation. The prayer is that we might be just to all men. Conversationat a meal, he says, should be light and decent, with no long accountsof books you have read.

    We have kept that sense of clean hands and tableware, we have keptthe flowers in the middle of the table, and we have kept the sense of ameal as a social gathering with conversation. Still life has concomitantlyguided the table as a civilizing occasion.

    Greek poetry is rich in still lifes, as was their painting, as we knowfrom the anecdote of the bird that tried to eat Apelles' cherries. Here isa poem to dedicate objects placed on an altar:

His green garden's twytined digging fork,
the curved sickle that pruned and weeded,
the comfortable old coat he wore in the rain,
and his raw oxhide waterproof boots,
the stick with which he set the cabbage sprouts
in long straight rows in rich black loam,
the hoe that chopped the runnels that kept
the garden green all the dry summer long,
for you, Gardener Priapos, the gardener Potamon,
whom you favored, places on your altar.

Another:

To Priapos, god of gardens and friend to travelers,
Damon the farmer laid on this altar,
with a prayer that his trees and body be hale
of limb for yet awhile, a pomegranate glossy bright,
a skippet of figs dried in the sun,
a cluster of grapes, half red, half green,
a mellow quince, a walnut splitting from its husk,
a cucumber wrapped in flowers and leaves,
and a jar of olives golden ripe.

    Claude Monet's The Luncheon of 1868 (in the Stadelsche Kunstinstitut,Frankfurt am Main) shows a sunny room in Argenteuil, ofwhich we can see some ten feet of floor space, a wall with window inforeshortened perspective on the left, a far wall with linen closet (and amaid getting something from it) and a table on which there are twobooks with the look of novels, an oil lamp, and a top hat. A round dinnertable fills the center of the painting, and two people are seated on itsfar side: Monet's first wife Camille and his infant son Jean in bib andtucker, wielding a spoon as if he means to ring chimes on his plate. Hisdoll lies discarded under a chair on the lower left of the canvas, and hisround hat hangs on the corner of the chair back. On the table, readingfrom left to right, we see a baguette of bread, a large bowl of green salad,cruets of oil and vinegar, a plate of white grapes, a bowl of jelly, a platterof crudites, a bottle of red wine, and a carafe of water. On Camille'splate is an egg in an egg cup, and there is a second egg on her plate.Monet's plate is charged the same, except for a heel of the loaf added,and a folded copy of Le Figaro. He has not arrived, and his cane-bottomed chair is pulled back.

    Let us study the design. If we make two axes, at right angles, onefrom us to the back wall, and one across the table, we find that we haveconnected egg with egg, the heel of bread with a glass of wine. Otherlines passing through the same point connect son's hat with top hat,newspaper with novels, oil cruet with oil lamp, loaf of bread with bottleof wine, and so on, until we see that the still life on the table isarranged so that the radii of a superimposed circle connect objects thatare kin to each other in the traditional manner of still-life composition.We detect a system of derivatives. The wine derives from the grapes, sonfrom mother. A sewing basket on the extra chair is a source for littleJean's clothes. We are even shown more tablecloths in the linen closet.Before we make so obvious an observation as that the food so beautifullydisplayed is the nourishment of their life, let us notice that Monetis always sharply aware of sources and derivations: that is his greatunderlying theme. The floormat is straw; the chairs are bamboo withplaited cane seats, the sewing basket is wicker; the bread is from thataccomplished grass, wheat, to which the Mediterranean people all attributedman's transition from hunter to farmer, and thence to cities andcivilization. The painting at its most abstract thus changes from being acharming tonal study of domestic life to one in which the artist hastraced lines to this focus. The Parisian newspaper and novels announcelines of transport to this country farmhouse; the top hat and rubber ball,Madame's locket and the silverware indicate craftsmen and shops thatsupply this household.

    Once Monet had reached maturity, he displayed a fascination withroads and paths, like Pissarro and Cezanne, and indeed all the greatImpressionists. Highways, whether rail or carriage or footpath, are theone subject that the Impressionists were never very far from. Was itbecause roads for the first time in European history all became safe andused by everybody? Was it a new awareness of mobility? Monet's GareSt-Lazare takes on a new light when we notice all these roads, even ifwe know that it is the station where one takes the train from Paris toGiverny. And in his full maturity, and on into old age, Monet devotedhimself to two subjects--his lily pond, a diversion of the river Epteacross the road from his house at Giverny, and the haystacks in the fieldadjacent. Add to this the Epte itself, with its lines of poplars, and youhave all of late Monet in an acre of French countryside, so dull andordinary that no photographer would waste a frame of film on it, andso bland that today one passes it in an automobile with no awarenessthat here is the original of some of the most beautiful landscapes in allof art.

    Europe, Braudel tells us, was all marshlands and forest when menbegan to clear it for agriculture. Hundreds of years went into drainingmarshes to make land on which wheat would grow. Two of Monet'smost persistent subjects thus leap into relief--the lily pond, which is amarsh, and the haystacks. And the river Epte is a drainage system intothe Seine and on into the sea. All of Monet's painting thus becomes astudy of the interaction of man and the earth, and of all the processes oflight and water. His other concerns are complementary: the beauty ofwomen and children, the beauty of flowers, and the mutations of weather.Only Thoreau was as assiduous an inspector of snowstorms andmeadows.

    The very first daguerreotype is a still life. For it, Louis-Jacques-MandeDaguerre assembled, in 1837, an assortment of plaster casts and otherobjects on a tabletop. Daguerre had begun experiments in photographywith its inventor, Joseph-Nicephore Niepce, who, in 1826, eleven yearsbefore, had made a photograph of a courtyard that needed all of a day'ssunlight for its exposure. Its dreary starkness and illogical shadows arenot so much a picture of space as one of time--shadows and naked lighton walls that would return in the still lifes of Giorgio De Chirico and theplays of Samuel Beckett.

    Daguerre was a painter, stage designer, and operator of the Diorama,a grandiose display of large paintings under dramatic lighting thatattempted to fuse illusion and perception--in a way that would lead toour moving pictures on large screens.

    In this first photographic still life we have, from left to right (forgettingthe lateral reversal of daguerreotype), an empty bowl, a plasterbas-relief of Da Vinci's head of a warrior copied from the silverpoint inthe British Museum, a wicker flask hanging by a string from the wall, aframed print of two clothed figures embracing in greeting or farewell, aplaster ram's head, two plaster winged heads of angels, a shallow roundbox, and a paper knife. Beside the table and leaning against it is a plasterbouquet of flowers and leaves.

    The textures are rich, the play of light and shadow Rembrandtesque.An analysis of its iconography will show that all the objects are traditionalprops, as if photography had nothing new to bring to the art ofstill life. To see where still life was flourishing at this time, we must turnto prose description in narrative.

    In July 1845, Hugh Miller, the forty-three-year-old Scottish geologistand editor of the Free Kirk newspaper The Witness, took his annualholiday, as always a geological expedition, on the yacht Betsey, whichwas a floating outlaw church. Its captain, the Rev. Mr. Swanson, and his firstmate John Stewart, together with Stewart's companion, "a powerful-looking,handsome young man, with broad bare breast," were the fullcomplement of the crew. With the immemorial stalwartness of Scottishpluck, whether in dodging the British customs patrol or preaching theGospel, the Betsey sailed from congregation to congregation in theHebrides to offer sermons in English or Gaelic, or if necessary in both.

    Miller, one of the most popular Victorian writers, was also one of thefinest prose stylists in English. His Old Red Sandstone inspiredLong-fellow's "Hymn of Life," and a phrase from his Testimony of theRocks--"a day of dappled seaborne clouds"--drifts through the mind ofStephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man just beforehis encounter with a girl wading in the shallows. The phrase encodes a fallof Icarus, or Lucifer, if we know Miller's text, where he is thinking ofMilton's fall of Mulciber

thrown by angry Jove
Sheer o'er the crystal battlements: from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,
A summer's day; and with the setting sun
Dropt from the zenith like a falling star.

Early in his account of this voyage of the Betsey, Hugh Miller describesthe cabin:

A well-thumbed chart of the Western Islands lay across an
equally well-thumbed volume of Henry's "Commentary."
There was a Polyglot and a spy-glass in one corner, and a
copy of Calvin's "Institutes" with the latest edition of "The
Coaster's Sailing Directions" in another; while in an adjoining
stateroom, nearly large enough to accommodate an armchair,
if the chair could have but contrived to get into it, I
caught a glimpse of my friend's printing press and his case of
types, canopied overhead by the blue ancient of the vessel,
bearing, in stately six-inch letters of white bunting, the legend
"FREE CHURCH YACHT." A door opened, which communicated
with the forecastle, and John Stewart, stooping very much, to
accommodate himself to the low-roofed passage, thrust in a
plate of fresh herrings, splendidly toasted, to give substantiality
and relish to our tea. The little rude forecastle, a considerably
smaller apartment than the cabin, was all aglow with the
bright fire in the coppers, itself invisible; we could see the
chain-cable dangling from the hatchway to the floor, and
John Stewart's companion ... in his shirt sleeves, squatted
full in from of the blaze, like the household goblin described
by Milton, or the "Christmas Present" of Dickens.

    To this rich still life there is later added "a fragment of rock ...charged with Liassic fossils," brought to the yacht by a Mr. Elder with anote saying that "the deposit to which it belonged occurred in the trapimmediately above the village mill; and further, to call my attention to ahouse near the middle of the village [of Tobermory], built of a moulderingred sandstone, which had been found in situ in digging the foundations"[Miller 1858: 26-27].

    We think of Joseph Wright of Derby because of the gleam of firelighton copper, and because the charm of Miller's description avoidsany effect of prettiness. As in a Holbein, books, maps, and scientificinstruments are integral to the subject. Henry's biblical commentary andCalvin's Institutes are clearly meant by Miller to be symbolic in theirarrangement with sea charts and a spyglass: we detect the hand ofBunyan. Durer might have placed these symbols just so if he hadwished to link emblems of the soul's pilgrimage to God with those ofwayfarers preaching the Gospel among rocky islands in a treacheroussea.

    The plate of fish completes this picture of Christian endeavor,though completion is not Miller's end: he chimes and echoes. To thereal fish he adds a fossil, stating the theme and problem of all hisbooks, his times, and the theme of his life, for the fossil is 190 millionyears old and requires us to read the Bible in an understanding otherthan literal.

    Milton's household goblin, in "L'Allegro":

To earn his Cream-bowl, duly set,
When in one night, ere glimpse of morn,
His shadowy Flail hath thresh'd the Corn
That ten day-labourers could not end;
Then lies him down the Lubber Fiend,
And, stretch'd out all the Chimney's length,
Basks at the fire his hairy strength;
And Crop-full out of doors he flings
Ere the first Cock his Matin rings. [106-114]

    Miller's mate's friend on the Betsey by the fire in the coppers isalso aligned with the Spirit of Christmas Present at Bob Cratchit's, with itshumble cheer and frugal repast. Did the chain cable hanging from thehatchway to the floor recall Marley's ghost hung with chains, and thusadd an allusion to Dickens? To play Dupin further: Miller exercised considerableingenuity in harmonizing Genesis and geology, and the anguishit caused him led to his suicide in 1856, after he endured pitiful illusionsof being followed and found himself confusing the sequence of mundaneevents so that he could not remember from one minute to the next whathe had done or where he had been.

    Miller's vision of geology followed that of Agassiz and others: creationhad happened over and over for millions of years, each creationdestroyed in time by a worldwide catastrophe that Miller saw in thefossil record. The strange Silurian creatures of the Old Red Sandstonehad all died in fear, fleeing the obliteration of the Calvinist god whohad made such monsters, a world of tropical forests of ferns, and a perpetualfog of steam, and then negated all this blind fertility with totaldevastation, only to begin again with new monsters, all but brainlessreptiles slithering through swamps of slime, until in this, the creationwe inhabit, the rational creature man was made in the image of hismaker.

    On the same page as Miller's still life of the Betsey's congenialcabin, he tells of the surviving pieces of the Spanish ship Florida,part of the Great Armada that was wrecked by one of God's catastrophes, and withthe same dip of ink he remarks on the melancholy look of Tobermory, atown that did not grow but was built all at once, "as Frankenstein madehis man."

    The fossil from the lower Jurassic, driftwood washed up from theInvincible Armada, a suffering Ghost from Dickens: Miller's still lifebegins to display a transparency through which we can see a Calvinistsuspicion of well-being as the mask of disaster to come, if not now,surely in all too short a while--and we may not be prepared. Let usimagine that Matthew Henry's great commentary (which George Whitefieldread through four times, on his knees, in the six folio volumes of1710, the inspiration of Cowper's hymns, part of the furniture of everyProtestant parsonage for 280 years, and still in print) is open to the bookof Amos, at chapter eight, verses 1-2, with which this chapter began."The approach of ... [Israel's] threatened ruin," Henry wrote, is representedby the basket of summer fruit that Amos saw in vision.

He saw a basket of summer fruit gathered and ready to be
eaten, which signified 1. That they were ripe for destruction,
that they lay ready to be eaten up, 2. That the year of God's
patience was drawing toward a conclusion; it was autumn
with them. 3. Those we call summer fruits will not keep till
winter, must be used immediately, and [are] the emblem of
this people, that had nothing consistent in them.... It signifies
that the end has come upon my people Israel. What was
said in Chapter eight is here repeated as God's determined
resolution, "I will not again pass by them anymore."

Translate that into Gaelic, make a sermon of it for a people, some ofwhom have never seen a tree, who live out of the ocean and from oatspersuaded to grow out of rock, and add to it Miller's study of these rocksand their record of creation after creation, each matured in eons andthen destroyed, and the charming array of fish and Calvin's Institutesand the polyglot Bible and the instruments of navigation in the Betsey'sforecastle figure in the long tradition of still life as the peculiarlyequivocal symbolism of tragedy implicit in all beauty.

Continues...

Excerpted from Objects on a Tableby Guy Davenport Copyright © 1999 by Guy Davenport. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1582430357
• ISBN 13: 9781582430355
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 136