Hidden Cargoes

William Blake’s famous lines urge us

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

This book challenges those who dismiss Blake as a dreamer or a madman. For them, sand grains are just sand grains, wildflowers no more than simple blooms. They believe that our hands can enclose nothing greater than what fits neatly in our grip, and that an hour is always confined within the palisade of its temporal duration. I leave to visionary geniuses like Blake the task of seeing on a scale that reveals worlds, heavens, infinity and eternity. My aim is more modest. My essays try to strip routine’s dulling insulation from the wires of experience so that the voltage of what’s there can touch us, make us aware of the hidden cargoes that are held in such abundance in the unlikeliest of places — a girl’s ear, a cigarette box, the letters of the alphabet, an owl’s skull, a sprig of witch-hazel. However much we contrive not to notice it, the electricity of wonder runs through everything. The twelve exercises in paying attention that constitute this book try to make that electricity more evident.

At the start of Portrait Inside My Head, Phillip Lopate provides an Introduction that’s sub-titled “In Defense of the Miscellaneous Essay Collection.” Since Hidden Cargoes is such a collection, should I likewise start by defending it?

Perhaps.

But such a tactic risks undermining what it’s meant to support. Faced with an opening salvo of authorial defense, readers may suspect that what they’re about to embark on lacks legitimacy. Why would it need to be defended unless its status was dubious?

I can see why almost any book might be thought to require an opening apologia. In a world in which so many people live in terrible need, the time and resources claimed by writing and reading might be thought questionable — frivolous, uncaring, selfish, irrelevant — unless a link can be demonstrated between them and some practical remedial upshot, a contribution to the common good. That apart, I see no reason why a collection of essays needs any more justification than a novel or a play or a book of poems.

In an essay about essays, provocatively entitled “In Defense of Incoherence,” E.J. Levy writes that “the form doesn’t lend itself to mass market sales.” But, she says, “that is precisely its charm and our pleasure in reading it.” In her view, part of the appeal of this genre lies in the fact that it provides a “respite from the clamor of commerce.” In putting together collections, she urges essayists not to succumb to the pressure of making their work more palatable to the economic exigencies of publishing, particularly by presenting it in a way that obscures the individual independence of each piece. To give the impression that essays can be subsumed beneath some organizing principle, to pretend there’s an overarching structure according to whose linear blueprint they unfold, is to betray their essential nature. “The first impulse that brought us to the essay form,” Levy reminds us, is art. And art is “not about the market or clever formal conceits, or even publication, but about wonder.”

I hope what I’ve said doesn’t swim against the current of Levy’s argument. The idea of paying attention and, by so doing, seeing the hidden cargoes carried in the things around us, offers a loose commonality that links the essays I’ve assembled. But I wouldn’t like it to be taken as a sign that I’ve surrendered to any kind of organizing principle. I join Levy in condemning such devices. The book’s title and epigraph, and what I’ve said in this Introduction, provide only the most general orientation. I’ve no desire to disguise the essentially miscellaneous nature of Hidden Cargoes. To invent some organizing principle that forces things into line, that gives the impression of a single narrative running unbroken from beginning to end, would be dishonest. The pages that follow don’t dance to this tune. The essays are independently intelligible and can be read in any order — though I’ve tried to arrange them in a way that’s in harmony with the music of their unfolding.

Some readers find this kind of collection an alarming prospect. They’re suspicious of the absence of a point-by-point progression. They feel uneasy outside the safe anchorage provided by linearity, where everything conforms to a predictable pattern of unfolding. If such readers haven’t fled the scene already, let me offer three reassuring touchstones — without, I hope, introducing the artificiality of the kind of organizing principle that Levy rightly condemns, or mounting a preemptive defense that might simply undermine what it seeks to foster.

First, as Graham Good puts it, “At heart, the essay is the voice of the individual.” To the extent that an individual’s voice reflects one particular personality, history, and worldview, Hidden Cargoes can claim that degree of homogeneity. Secondly, I agree with Levy about the fundamental nature of art. All of my essays share a common origin. They are rooted in moments of wonder. Thirdly, in a comment that nicely catches the way in which single essays relate to a collection, Richard Chadbourne suggests that the essay “is both fragmentary and complete in itself, capable both of standing on its own and of forming a kind of ‘higher organism’ when assembled with other essays by its author.” Hidden Cargoes is precisely such a beast. All of its constituent body parts contribute to what the “higher organism” is concerned with — namely exploring the extraordinary nature of the ordinary.