Bright surfaces are richer in detail than shadowy deeps

Bright surfaces are richer in detail than shadowy deeps

Posted on July 28th, 2009 by Frank Wilson

The poet Frank O’Hara’s friend Joe LeSueur tells the story somewhere — I’m pretty sure it’s in Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara — that after O’Hara’s memorial service in Greenwich Village, the composer Ned Rorem invited everyone in attendance back to his apartment. Impressed by how smoothly Rorem handled matters, LeSueur took a moment to compliment and thank him. According to LeSueur, Rorem leaned over and murmured, “You must understand, I don’t feel things deeply.”

This sounds like something the author of The Paris Diary would say, and even, to some extent, mean. Rorem, who is a wonderfully charming man, probably is not given to feeling deeply — in public. Like any good artist, he can’t afford to squander emotion. It is also like him not to put on airs of profundity.

Why deep is thought to be better than shallow has always escaped me. It certainly isn’t necessarily so. Ask any trout fisherman.

When I was a kid, I heard a radio play about Floyd Collins, a spelunker who was trapped in a cave in Kentucky and died there. It scared the daylights out of me. So maybe it’s the very thought of dark depths that puts me off, somewhat like the thought of being buried alive.

At any rate, much excitement can be found on the surface of things. Still water may run deep, but shallow water often runs fast, and managing rapids takes skill. Things may draw nourishment from the depths, but the fruit of that nourishment — the point of it — manifests itself on the surface. We munch apples, not apple roots.

Our life, after all, is lived on the crust of the planet, not within its bowels, and there is vastly more variety in the play of sunlight on water rushing over rocks and pebbles than in the monotonous greenish brown that settles in when the current grows sluggish. Indeed, bright surfaces are richer in detail than shadowy deeps, and to observe them truly requires sharpness of perception. “Accuracy of observation,” Wallace Stevens observed, “is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking,” and is more likely when light rather than darkness prevails.

And what is true of things in general is true also of the self. At least it is true of myself. My psyche may have its depths, but I am not inclined to visit them. To be honest, I doubt there is much of worth to be found in what Beckett, in Ohio Impromptu, calls “profounds of mind buried in who knows what profounds of mind, or mindlessness, whither no light can reach, no sound.”

Not long ago, while walking about town, I happened to see a particularly attractive young woman, triggering the usual male thrill. Moments later I caught a glimpse of myself in a storefront window and noticed how white my beard looked. Immediately, I thought of the lovely woman I had seen and realized with dismay that I was long since out of the running for the affections of any such as her. In the cast of life, I was now suitable for the Maurice Chevalier role in Gigi. What a bummer.

Intimations of mortality began to dog my thoughts. Now, my feelings are no deeper than I am, which is to say not especially, but they are, so far as they go, intense, and I never run from them. In fact, I rather like pondering them, turning them this way and that as it were, the way one might observe a pear ripening on a shelf.

And so I spent several days feeling very melancholy. As it happens, I cannot sustain any strong emotion indefinitely. I soon grow insensitive to it, the way one ceases, after a time, to notice a strong odor. And so, having indulged my melancholy to the full, it faded away and I became again my usual insouciant self.

“Only the shallow know themselves,” Oscar Wilde said. As with many of Wilde’s quips, this is not as clear-cut as it may at first seem. On the one hand, the shallow may know themselves simply because there is so little for them to know. On the other, it is surely better to know oneself to be shallow than to mistake oneself for deep. The mystics tell us that enlightenment involves giving up the sense of self. The shallow among us would obviously have less personal baggage to discard. I find this reassuring. I may just have a leg up on satori.