Inscape

Hopkins with his fine eye & excruciated tone would stare a thing down until its thing-ness dissolved into a kind of essentiality; not precisely its own essence, but a marriage of both its individuated & its general modes of being. A kind of auratic wavering that ghosts a thing. He'd spy a knotted chestnut tree, or a gust roiling over grain-tops, & in each subtle motion & after exacting witness there would come to the forefront of consciousness the apophantic moment, the rising at the same time of the thing & the self. Coupled thus with the world, Hopkins felt the embrace of his god, in the dissolution of a border between self & self's alterity. What seems critical of a sudden is that never for one moment did his inscaping demand an absented sense of self, never did it hush the quiet storm within his own rising chest. He was an essential part of the world's universality, as much as the kingfisher or the carrion or the Deutschland splintered against the loaming stones. Awe for the natural world leads to strange compulsions, to inclinations towards a kind of self-release, as if we could vanish somehow in our environs, as if we put ourselves aside upon entering into a forest & resumed our regular selfhood upon exiting. We want unblemished exultation, unbesmirched simplicity, to use a Bronte term. & though we feel its thrum within, we think it somehow the enervation of something exterior to us rather than a natural sympathy arising within ourselves. We think it the mood cast by anteriority instead of a kind of homeostatic rising wherein our being meets its environs halfway. Put me in a city & my being deflates, sullies, turns curt & bothered, noisy & frantic. Put me in a forest & it turns quiet, calm & contemplative. We are transactors & things transacted at once, & our commerce ought to be cleanly brought about. We will meet with our surroundings on terms dictated by both parties. I suppose this is all to say that I've the patience to navigate the fine contours of a chestnut more than I have to count the cars on the turnpike. It's a wonder we made it through.