Green is the Orator (4 page)

where the
salubrity
of the water is being determined,

where a squid is blacking in the margins, where dolphins arc

and go below, where all our options are not the same—

transparency—semitransparency—

opacity
—
and all our options

are not the same—
healthfulness, wholesomeness
,

nutritiousness, salubrity
—
soundness, aptness
,

rightness, goodness
.

Under whose ascending rungs

the interior is gutted

                           and started again.

Modern. Sustainable. Minimal.

 

Lady of the smokebush,

gray in the act of mauve.

Don't move.

There is a worse thing,

I wager, than being seen.

Desire is to indifference as indifference, to aversion.

Who is moved to encounter is in the beginning

at home in all shapes before the end. Shine a distance

on this working sail: in the beginning was the making

of ships, and the ships were made

by the grace of trees.

Off-broken earth, moon of long measures, appear to us

to help us appear.

Little Dipper—

Extravagant utensil.

the purpose is not to explain the significance of words

they being apparently obscured by the clouds

in endless succession, rolling darkly down the stream

in which were many luminous points similar

they being apparently obscured by the clouds

often experienced on rising suddenly

in which were many luminous points similar

and stretching out the arms

often experienced on rising suddenly

after sitting long in one position

and stretching out the arms

incapable of speaking

after sitting long in one position

consciousness of where I was

incapable of speaking

who was near me

consciousness of where I was

my whole frame

who was near me

I thought I panted violently

my whole frame

I felt a singing in my ears

I thought I panted violently

as if their velocity had been suddenly accelerated

I felt a singing in my ears

the bursting of a barrier

as if their velocity had been suddenly accelerated

the actions of inspiring and expiring

the bursting of a barrier

in which were many luminous points similar

the actions of inspiring and expiring

they being apparently obscured by the clouds

Thatchwork. Threnody. Theogeny. The earth in all its ill-

imagined parts

                        
did issue does issue will issue

Sleeping out of doors in the out-of-doors

      
         
         

the rest is made of what

I.

In the spring of 1799, at age twenty, following his self-administration

of nitrous oxide, Roget wrote in his report to the Pneumatic Institution,

I cannot remember that I experienced the least pleasure

from any of these sensations. . . . And as it is above two months

since I made the experiment, many of the minuter circumstances

have probably escaped me
.

Humphry Davy, a year older than Roget,

and the Institute's superintendent,

found that inhalations effected desirable

changes in his poetry. Breathing nitrous oxide

while walking the hills at Clifton,

near Bristol, he composed lines like these:

Yet are my eyes with sparkling luster fill'd;

Yet is my mouth replete with murmuring sound;

Yet are my limbs with inward transports filled;

And clad with newborn mightiness around
.

[contemporaries Coleridge and Southey are meanwhile envisioning

the banks of the Susquehanna as the site of their pantisocracy.]

II.

In our childhood, my brother and I had teeth pulled

under laughing gas. As we came back to thinking

in a shared recovery room, we roared at everything that moved,

or spoke—or did an absurd impersonation of doing both.

III.

To arrive at the core of “green” in my thesaurus

I go through the thinking of “greenness”—

virescence, verdancy, verdure
—through the feeling of green places—

sward, park, greenbelt, turf
—through the music of its pigments—
celadonite
,

chlorophyll, viridian
—

through ephemera of green things—
chrysoprase, spinach, putting green
—

through green figures

of speech—
greenroom, greenhorn, green thumb
—

to compounds escaping

parts of speech—
Nile-green, leek-green, sea-green—

lime-green—dull-green—leaf-green
.

IV.

The last of Roget's major labors, begun in 1849 in his seventieth year,

and published in 1852 as
The Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases
,

had few detractors. One of these, E. P. Whipple, said this

of the work in the
North American Review:

Seriously, we consider this book as one of the best

of a numerous class, whose aim is to secure the results without

imposing the tasks of labor, to arrive at ends by a dexterous

dodging of means, to accelerate the tongue

without accelerating the faculties
.

It is an outside remedy for an inward defect. In our opinion, the work mistakes

the whole process by which living thought makes its way into living words
…

In the mind of Whipple, Roget's
Thesaurus
made a dangerous move

to separate words from feelings,
to shrivel up language

into a mummy of thought.

V.

Using his knowledge of biological classification, Roget had,

one must admit, done something backward, plotting every word

of the thesaurus, by outline and tabular organization,

into six major classes

of ideas:

   I. Abstract Relations

  II. Space

 III. Matter

IV. Intellect

 V. Volition

VI. Sentient and Moral Powers

To get
to
the words,

he forked ideas into sections and heads, so that under

class IV—“Intellect”—one would have found under section II,

Precursory Conditions and Operations
,

the following “heads”:

Curiosity

Incuriosity

Discrimination

Indiscrimination

VI.

Having left the “irregular” Institute behind,

Roget was, a few years later, wearing green glasses against the glare

in trips beyond Geneva

                to see the glaciers.

I am a field enduring, growing wheat one year, barley the next, tangled flowering papyrus, a hill of sand. I am everafter, changing, while the eye of the watcher shines and takes me in.

In the great while under

the monkey puzzle tree, the mockingbird learns

to rusted gate. He will not go so far. He will not find the words.

But will his throat, not rust, but taking its time to sound,

leave, in tracks of rain, a color of rust inside you, or make, as if

he knew, the air a means of import?

From the chanting bird, from the word
stronger
—

from the funny tree, the evergreen.

                   Living fossil,

what has come over you?

It would puzzle a monkey to climb that
. The spiky

points, the injury.
Not far from the invention of fire, we must rank

the invention of doubt
.

     Who is here, is here. To abide. To be kind.

To be sound in skeptic combat with the stronger

sound of waves—the practiced sound of waves—the practical

     thinking there.

Thousands of rulers up

and the wings are a copied motility

and a cabin is for breathing above the earth

and for walking in on elsewhere.

Why not a horse

now that the fields are visible?

The sun is always

circling the story. Like how

you showed me

how the hummingbirds feed:

saying
This is a moat

                             and pointing

leading to accident. A child among knives, mallets, and punches.

The awl slips in his eye.

Morning that comes like an altered ear, according to birds,

according to coughs.

World that goes on beyond the evident. Vibrant rocks

at the edge of the brook. Radishes revolving in water. The butterfly duskiest

nearest the body

to keep the ovaries warm.

Louis Braille. This is how the stars move. This is how to set the table.

This is the smell of a heating oven. Listen and remember.

Slant rains all day, and thunder. At organ practice, crosswinds audible

through glass. Paris coming apart in bells.

How then?

Not reading
rive
on pins.

Not soldiers nightwriting in the dark.

The milk wagons wake him from a dream, a rope gang long enough

to wander Paris.

Louis Braille. Braille. The world goes on.

Six dots to a cell, and passages of it

raised above surface.

Is the oculus I omitted from the higher

story, the detailed forgetting of orbital bones.

Pinned thing, a common Pierrot,

heir to the room's declining momentum.

Close to finest ossicle,

The storm is being bargained down.

Window, you feel the last of it:

elucidation's dropping value, dark, the after-

thought of switch,

the fan in a flower of paddles.

Where the green pump calls for wonderful arms

to bring up water in iron gulps

pan left: to distant fluctuations, to hooves freaking

insects out of grass.

The soundtrack said:
You think your thirst

arcs from the waterspout when in fact

it arcs from the ground
.

Sinister, like a ventriloquist draining a glass of water

while making