“The Study” by Stuart Greenhouse was published in NAR issue 301.4.
As I remember it, when I was very young, my mom liked to ask me idle questions in our backyard. Maybe we were reading, maybe watering the garden, maybe watching the dog snuffle around. She was relaxed about it, but there was an urgency too, as if it really mattered what I answered to her, right then. “Why paint a flower, when you can look at a real one, in the real sun?” These moments got me thinking, thoughts which kept me mute at the time, and have since then not stopped. I didn’t know then that this particular question was a question at the heart of Western thought, nor that it would become one muscular fiber of the heart of confusion I’ve grown to think of as myself. But since then, however much I read Aristotle or Wittgenstein or de Saussure, and learn to think things through on their aesthetic terms, this particular question remains a personal and not a traditional one. The terms by which it remains personal sustains a state of being by which the two realms of inquiry, traditional and personal, have so little commerce as to be functionally unrelated.
Reading Yeats, or Dickinson, or Shakespeare, I can feel differently. Their terms aren’t trying to be anyone’s but their own, by which I mean unabstracted. The experience their utterance traces remains successfully one strictly of the imagination’s senses and eyes, and that keeps them relatable as they are understood. There is, if not an answer, at least an answering. Similarly, Rubens’ sketch. It’s one of those mysteries astounding not for the complexity of it undone, but for its simplicity perceived. My hand, his hand. It’s so simple.
This is, for me, the good thing, the thing worth doing. To keep returning to that strange moment of awareness and confusion from my backyard when I was eight, and keep answering, and answering, and answering, in different ways, all my life. Not that any are real answers, just moments, insofar as a real answer would put to rest the question. An answering more like breath is, or a heart beating; a thing which keeps happening, and is life.
Stuart Greenhouse is the author of the poetry chapbook What Remains (Poetry Society of America), and the recipient of a 2014 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council of the Arts. Poems have appeared in journals such as Antioch Review, Fence, Laurel Review, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares.