The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar’s House

by Howard Nemerov

in memory of the painters Paul Klee

and Paul Terence Feeley

I

The painter’s eye follows relation out.

His work is not to paint the visible,

He says, it is to render visible.

Being a man, and not a god, he stands

Already in a world of sense, from which

He borrows, to begin with, mental things

Chiefly, the abstract elements of language:

The point, the line, the plane, the colors and

The geometric shapes. Of these he spins

Relation out, he weaves its fabric up

So that it speaks darkly, as music does

Singing the secret history of the mind.

And when in this the visible world appears,

As it does do, mountain, flower, cloud, and tree,

All haunted here and there with the human face,

It happens as by accident, although

The accident is of design. It is because

Language first rises from the speechless world

That the painterly intelligence

Can say correctly that he makes his world,

Not imitates the one before his eyes.

Hence the delightsome gardens, the dark shores,

The terrifying forests where nightfall

Enfolds a lost and tired traveler.

And hence the careless crowd deludes itself

By likening his hieroglyphic signs

And secret alphabets to the drawing of a child.

That likeness is significant the other side

Of what they see, for his simplicities

Are not the first ones, but the furthest ones,

Final refinements of his thought made visible.

He is the painter of the human mind

Finding and faithfully reflecting the mindfulness

That is in things, and not the things themselves.

For such a man, art is an act of faith:

Prayer the study of it, as Blake says,

And praise the practice; nor does he divide

Making from teaching, or from theory.

The three are one, and in his hours of art

There shines a happiness through darkest themes,

As though spirit and sense were not at odds.

II

The painter as an allegory of the mind

At genesis. He takes a burlap bag,

Tears it open and tacks it on a stretcher.

He paints it black because, as he has said,

Everything looks different on black.

Suppose the burlap bag to be the universe,

And black because its volume is the void

Before the stars were. At the painter’s hand

Volume becomes one-sidedly a surface,

And all his depths are on the face of it.

Against this flat abyss, this groundless ground

Of zero thickness stretched against the cold

Dark silence of the Absolutely Not,

Material worlds arise, the colored earths

And oil of plants that imitate the light.

They imitate the light that is in thought,

For the mind relates to thinking as the eye

Relates to light. Only because the world

Already is a language can the painter speak

According to his grammar of the ground.

It is archaic speech, that has not yet

Divided out its cadences in words;

It is a language for the oldest spells

About how some thoughts rose into the mind

While others, stranger still, sleep in the world.

So grows the garden green, the sun vermilion.

He sees the rose flame up and fade and fall

And be the same rose still, the radiant in red.

He paints his language, and his language is

The theory of what the painter thinks.

III

The painter’s eye attends to death and birth

Together, seeing a single energy

Momently manifest in every form,

As in the tree the growing of the tree

Exploding from the seed not more nor less

Than from the void condensing down and in,

Summoning sun and rain. He views the tree,

The great tree standing in the garden, say,

As thrusting downward its vast spread and weight,

Growing its green height from the dark watered earth,

And as suspended weightless in the sky,

Haled forth and held up by the hair of its head.

He follows through the flowing of the forms

From the divisions of the trunk out to

The veinings of the leaf, and the leaf’s fall.

His pencil meditates the many in the one

After the method in the confluence of rivers,

The running of ravines on mountainsides,

And in the deltas of the nerves; he sees

How things must be continuous with themselves

As with whole worlds that they themselves are not,

In order that they may be so transformed.

He stands where the eternity of thought

Opens upon perspective time and space;

He watches mind become incarnate; then

He paints the tree.

IV

These thoughts have chiefly been about the painter Klee,

About how he in our hard time might stand to us

Especially whose lives concern themselves with learning

As patron of the practical intelligence of art,

And thence as model, modest and humorous in sufferings,

For all research that follows spirit where it goes.

That there should be much goodness in the world,

Much kindness and intelligence, candor and charm,

And that it all goes down in the dust after a while,

This is a subject for the steadiest meditations

Of the heart and mind, as for the tears

That clarify the eye toward charity.

So may it be to all of us, that at some times

In this bad time when faith in study seems to fail,

And when impatience in the street and still despair at home

Divide the mind to rule it, there shall be some comfort come

From the remembrance of so deep and clear a life as his

Whom I have thought of, for the wholeness of his mind,

As the painter dreaming in the scholar’s house,

His dream an emblem to us of the life of thought,

The same dream that then flared before intelligence

When light first went forth looking for the eye.

Howard Nemerov, “The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar’s House” from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977). Copyright © 1977 by Howard Nemerov.

painting by Paul Klee

image found here:  painting by Klee