Inscapes

When the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins saw an ash cut down, he wrote that “there came at that moment a great pang and I wished to die and not to see the inscapes of this world destroyed any more.” Inscapes is a word he made up. Or rather, cobbled-together between the Anglo-Saxon sceap – creation – and from instaepe – threshold.

A threshold of creation – what a weight of meaning to set on any place, right? And yet I find myself thinking about inscapes a lot on my scuttlings and creepings around the forest.

I came to a clearing a few weeks ago. There the forest gave way to scattered bracken, bedraggled clumps of squat and solitary bushes, dried grasses, snow. Across this place I could see the forest continue on – tall, solemn trees, ice silvering their darkness. They seemed together like a vast cloud rolling back.

I felt a pull on the back of my brain to an old feeling in me. One I associate with first encounters with great mystery in my childhood. Earliest I think, is the entranceway to the Philadelphia art museum. I looked up a long stair to the figure of Diana, drawing her bow. As in a temple, as in a forest (and they really are the same thing, temples and forests).

I could go on, trace my impressions back and bejewel them with purple Proustian adjectives. But how to make “threshold” moments intelligible? Most attempts can come off utterly pompous, self-indulgent, or just flat. Like whenever I go back to Philadelphia and see that my Diana is never so imposing, nor the stair so long, nor the hall so grand and dark as in my childhood imagination.

At the risk of more pomposity, I really do think that art is the threshold. Or maybe what it dreams itself to be. A space where made-things can look out on inarticulate creation.

Hopkins’ best poems have all this beauty and terror in them (from “I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes” plunging into “O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me / thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me?”). And I think it is no accident that the word of creation, scaep, is so close to the word for poet, scop. Because what can you do at a threshold but try (small steps, but there) to cross?