a romanticism of the real

Last Saturday morning I went birdwatching with the Ditmas Park Birdwatcher’s Club, organized by Andrew, proprietor of our local bookstore, and led by Jalen, an extraordinary young man with an encyclopedic knowledge of birds and a gift for telling about their habits and lives. Though I have gone on many walks at one of the Audubon Society’s wildlife sanctuaries on Cape Cod, I’d never before gone on a walk with the main purpose of seeking out birds. I hoped on this walk not just to see birds but to learn how to see birds—what to look for, and where and when and how. Before we even began to look, Jalen spoke about wind direction, temperature, and time of year, and I came to understand just how contingent and dynamic birdwatching is, and not just because birds don’t stay in one place as trees do. I also came to understand that looking for birds involves listening to them as well—hearing a bird tells you where to look for it.

I want to know how to see birds in the same way I want to know how to see trees, clouds, the moon, and stars. Last year, in an inquiry into the history of the trees of Prospect Park, I announced my commitment to learn to really see what’s there, which I described as a different sort of romanticism than the romanticism of my youth, a romanticism that involved lots of wishing, dreaming, and making things up.

Lately I’ve been wondering how I can call this commitment to seeing what’s real any sort of romanticism at all. Isn’t romanticism supposed to be about the primacy of the imagination, opening the doors of perception, and etcetera?

This question pointed me to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake so that I could find out exactly what he might have meant by “the doors of perception.” Reading this text is a bracing experience: in declarative sentence after declarative sentence after declarative sentence, the narrator states claims—or reports on the “Proverbs of Hell”—in a voice that is simultaneously both wholehearted and ironic. The doors of perception appear at the conclusion of an expository section in the middle of the work:

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

These lines of exposition follow a “Memorable Fancy” in which the narrator questions the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, asking them “how they dared so roundly to assert that God spake to them”; Isaiah answers: “I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing.”

Given the irony and many contradictions in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, I’m not sure I fully understand what Blake might have meant in these lines, but in themselves they express what I seek: to encounter the ineffable through my attention to small, particular things. This search is a kind of romanticism because it is compelled by a sense that there is always something extra, something just beyond what I can perceive, and that the only way to comprehend it is to keep looking. Whereas to make things up with no reference to the real would be to live a dream life closed up in Plato’s cave—and to miss loving what is right in front of me. Because to attend to things as they are is to love them. Because imagining a better world requires this kind of love.

While reading Blake I wished that I, too, could write a manifesto, and I guess I just did.

Meanwhile, in the past couple days I realized that, given my understanding of how plants unfurl and bloom in spring—snowdrops followed by crocuses and soon after daffodils and then the pale green haze of the earliest new leaves, and so on—I am certainly capable, over time, of adding some knowledge of migrating birds to the story. I’ve also decided that, because I don’t have binoculars and also because I spend most of my time in the park running in loops around the park, I should focus my beginning study of birds on learning their songs. I can learn how to look by listening.