A Monologue on Wallace Stevens—Entitled Opinions 12/09/2009

12/09/2009

A Monologue on Wallace Stevens

This is KZSU Stanford.

Welcome to entitled opinions.

My name is Robert Harrison.

And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.

If you've already listened to the Macqueville show we posted yesterday,

you'll remember that I was undecided whether to do a season ending monologue

on Macqueville or one on Wallace Stevens.

So we decided to do both.

As our new producer, Christy Wampol put it, Macqueville was the main dish,

Stevens is the dessert.

It's dessert time, a phalanej coming up.

By the way, Christy is turning out to be a worthy successor to Harris Fine-Sawd,

who in his turn was a worthy successor to David Lummis.

I've said before that 90% of my job as host of this program is choosing the right guests,

but an actual fact 90% of it consists in choosing the right producer.

Once the right producer is in place, the rest takes care of itself.

Doesn't it, Christy?

The rest gets taken care of by the producer you mean?

That's exactly what I mean.

So maybe I can go home now.

I need a little more to work with.

We'll give you something to work with.

But first, how about we give some air time to this guitar solo?

Your pleasure lives in tooth or pulpit.

Don't give me no beer full.

I'll tell you about that water is cool.

I would like to call today's monologue, the Winter Solstice show of 2009.

The Winter Solstice is coming up in about 10 days or so from now.

Last year, our Winter Solstice show was on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

And that was a dark one indeed.

What I have to say about the American poet Wallace Stevens today will be more uplifting than anything in the Conrad monologue.

Or at least the show will be less catabatic.

How's that for a pretentious word?

It comes from the Greek Katabasis, which means a going down or a going under.

The way Dante goes down to the bottom of hell in the Inferno, or the way Marlow goes down the Congo River to the Heart of Darkness.

Actually, he goes up the Congo River geographically speaking.

But it is a descent.

Anyway, no catabasis for us today.

But it's still going to be a wintery show.

Because in my view, Wallace Stevens, along with Archie Ammons in the Snow Poems, is one of the most extraordinary winter poets who ever wrote.

In fact, I believe that Stevens is a sustained quest to get in touch with reality.

A very different kind of reality than the one we talked about last time with Machiavelli.

This quest to get in touch with the reality in his most pure state can be understood as an attempt to reduce perception or the perception of nature's appearances to a bare, de-ornamentalized, wintry essentialism.

So, I promise that today's show will not depress you, but at the same time I feel I should forewarn you that you're in for a fair bit of philosophical abstraction.

Because Stevens was not only a highly intellectual poet, he was the poet of abstraction.

The main reason he loved winter was because he saw it as the season of abstraction.

One of the reasons I wanted to do this show is because Stevens' poetry has always perplexed me, and I hope through this exercise today to un-purplex myself with regard to the baffling abstraction into which his poems recede and out of which they seem to be generated.

What does that abstraction have to do with Stevens' idea of nature?

That's one way of phrasing the question I intend to pursue today.

My suspicion is that it has everything to do with it because I'm convinced that I will not understand any of his poems adequately without first coming to terms with the idea of nature that's embedded within them.

So, let me start with a proposition, idea and nature are essentially homologous in the thought of Wallace Stevens.

By this I mean that nature is not something of which we find an idea in the sense of a cognitive concept in his poems.

It is the coming into being of the idea as such.

By the same token the idea is the coming into being of nature.

And if I can convince you that this is more than just playing around with words,

and inverting syntax I will have achieved something.

Now, this is an abstract and obscure claim that is a need of elucidation, and I know of no better place to begin than with the beginning of a poem of Stevens' is called notes toward a supreme fiction.

Where Stevens' use of the term idea makes it clear that idea and nature are bound together by an originary kinship.

"Begin, Epheeb, by perceiving the idea of this invention, this invented world, the inconceivable idea of the sun.

You must become an ignorant man again, and see the sun again with an ignorant eye, and see it clearly in the idea of it."

Never suppose an inventing mind as source of this idea, nor for that mind, compose a voluminous master folded in his fire.

Now, it seems to me altogether appropriate that in a poem that speaks about retrieving or rediscovering the first idea, Stevens should harken back to the archaic etymological sense of the word idea.

In Greek, "idane" means actually to see and is related to edos, which we understand as the outward aspect or look of something.

The idea is to be perceived, not conceived.

The sun in its inconceivable, as he says in the poem, where is that line again?

The inconceivable idea of the sun, you remember that?

The sun in its ideas inconceivable because mental conceiving and representing our secondary activities of the mind,

whereas ideas are primary phenomena as they appear to an ignorant eye, ignorant in the sense that this eye is prior to all knowledge.

The primordial relation of idea to thing is that of phenomenal witness, of the ideas sheer reception of the phenomenon's appearance.

When the sun is seen in its idea, it is, I quote, "washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven that has expelled us and our images."

This heaven of originality remains uncontaminated by the eight posteriori images, myths, and anthropomorphisms, by which human beings have conceived the sun or given the sun names that falsely signify its nature.

The sun in its first idea is prehistorical, preconceptual, and pre-linguistic, quote, "phobus was a name for something that could never be named."

Phobus being the mythological name for the sun.

I'd like to leave aside the dense platonic background of notes towards a supreme fiction, the allegory of the cave, for example, in which the sun figures as the analogy for Plato's idea

We talked about that in our show on Plato recently.

So, leaving that aside, I'd like to emphasize instead this poem's invocation of human kinds first habitat according to the Bible.

The call to perceive the world in its first idea is that bottom, a summons to recover an adenic vision of nature.

If, by Eden, we understand a phenomenal plenitude that preceded not only the fall, but atoms act of naming the species.

Indeed, for Stevens, the Bible's pre-labsarian Eden, pre-labsarian is another big word, Christy.

It means, before the fall.

This pre-labsarian Eden was in some basic sense for Stevens already fallen.

It was a fallen place, insofar as it was already subjected to concept and name, was already taken of possession by a false secondary human imagination, because it was in Eden that Adam actually first named the species.

I quote, "The first idea was not our own.

Adam in Eden was the father of Descartes, and Eve made air the mirror of herself."

I take this to mean that Adam was the progenitor of our Cartesian anthropocentric subjectivity to use a word that simplifies and even to some extent,

vulgarizes Stevens' thinking here.

Adam, too, conceived of the world as his representation, as but a reflection of his own mind, just as Eve saw in the air a mirror of herself.

But again, to see the world in our own image is not to see it in its idea.

But the first idea was not to shape the clouds in imitation.

The clouds preceded us.

There was a muddy center before we breathed.

There was a myth before the myth began, venerable and articulate and complete.

From this the poem springs that we live in a place that is not our own, and much more not ourselves.

And hard it is, in spite of blazing days.

What a poet that guy was.

Stevens' poetry, if we believe these last verses, aims to find its way back to that aboriginal nature which is not our own and which was there before Adam committed his first sin,

not the sin of transgression by which he lost the garden, but the sin of denomination by which he took possession of it in the first place.

How is this return to a beginning that proceeds even the beginning to be realized?

For the present purposes suffice it to say that it is to be realized through poetry's power to suspend, neutralize, or defigure,

the false imagination, which Stevens refers to in his book, The Necessary Angel, when he writes, I quote,

"This is prose now, not poetry."

Quote, "It is important to believe that the visible is the equivalent of the invisible, and once we believe it we have destroyed the imagination."

That is to say, we have destroyed the false imagination, the false conception of the imagination as some incalculable vactus within us."

You can see why my civelli and Stevens came together in my mind here, we're talking about two people who were in a very systematic search for the effectual truth of reality and who both had problems with a certain vision of the human imagination.

In any case, it takes a poet of reality to realize this defiguration of the Adamic imagination.

And when I say a poet of reality, I'm actually alluding to a book by Hillis Miller that came out, I believe, in the 60s or early 70s,

It's called Poets of Reality, and it has a very long chapter on Wallace Stevens, which I consider one of the best things ever written about Stevens still to this day.

That was before Hillis Miller became a deconstructionist, by the way.

Anyway, against the inventive, anthropomorphizing imagination, the poet must deploy another kind of imagination,

call it the imagination of the idea, or simply what I would call the abstract imagination.

The title of the first section of notes towards a supreme fiction is called "It Must Be Abstract."

It calls for the abstraction of the idea from the historical linguistic and conceptual incrustations, which the phenomenon has accrued over time,

to abstract. And by the way, that word abstract, abstracted it is the Latin root.

Absided in Latin means to draw away, to draw something from, to abstract literally to remove something from.

So to abstract means to tear the phenomenon away from its representations, and restore it to its pre-human, pre-historized originality.

Only if the human mind turns against itself, and decompounds its own "crewed" compounding,

of the real, can the world reappear in its first idea.

For this to happen, the imaginative mind must not only refrain from invention, it must somehow evacuate itself of all its subjectivistic content,

and become the purely nullified receptor of what Stevens calls the "thing itself."

That is, the phenomenon in its first appearance.

The recurring trope in Stevens' corpus for this nullification of the mind,

namely its reduction to pure receptive absence, is that of winter.

Winter is the objective correlative, as it were, of poetic defiguration and mental canosis.

Another big word, it means emptying oneself out evacuation.

I think the following verses from part three of notes towards a supreme fiction make this clear.

Quote, "To discover winter and know it well, to find not to impose, not to have reasoned at all, out of nothing, to have come on major weather.

It is possible, possible, possible, it must be possible.

It must be that in time, the real will, from its crude compounding's come."

The real here is another word for the first idea. It will be born, will come forth from its crude compounding's.

He speaks later of, quote, "seeming at first a beast, discouraged, unlike, warmed by a desperate milk."

So it will come forth from these crude compounding's only in the mind's winter of abstraction when the mind becomes nothing but the invisible register of what is there in itself.

Through its own disactivation, the mind will discover, or lay bare the real, which has been covered by a history of false imaginings.

Stephen's best-known testament of the mind's wintry abstraction is, of course, his early poem, "The Snowman," which is probably his most anthologized poem.

And perhaps one of his most beautiful. Let me read it for you.

"The Snowman," one must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the bows of the pine trees crusted with snow,

and have been cold a long time to behold the junipers shagged with ice, the spruces rough in the distant glitter of the January sun,

and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind, in the sound of a few leaves, which is the sound of the land full of the same wind that is blowing in the same bare place for the listener,

who listens in the snow, and nothing himself, beholds nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is."

So the precondition for seeing the phenomena of winter, at least to see them in their first idea, is to have a mind of winter.

The mind of winter is where winter happens in and for itself. Winter needs the mind to become wintry so that its wintryness can come forth in its idea.

I would put this another way by saying that the mind is the original place where the phenomenon makes its first appearance.

In other words, without the mind, there is no phenomenon.

I take the equivalence at Stevens' pauses between the visible and invisible to refer to this interdependence between the thing itself and the human mind, for which and in which,

the phenomenon becomes present in its idea.

The more the observer or listener becomes nothing himself, the more he beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

The nothing is our mortal human presence in the world, a presence which is that bottom and absence that has a primitive presence of its own.

I apologize for these abstractions, but that is where Stevens' poetry is taking us.

Without it, the phenomenon has no place to appear.

It is, after all, for the listener, that the wind blows.

Without the listener, there is no sound of the land.

This is not to say that nature is constituted by a cogitating subject.

It is to say that the phenomenon and the mind share a common antecedent matrix whereby one is the visible or invisible correlate of the other.

Another word for this correlative matrix is, I submit, "nature."

If the idea comes first, if it proceeds myth, name, or concept, then clearly nature cannot be something priorly given of which the mind subsequently forms an idea.

Nature is rather the inconceivable birth of the idea or the phenomenon in its visibility.

Nature is not one term of the correlation, but the source of the correlation itself.

Nature is what awakens when mind and phenomenon awaken each other from their pre-phenomenal dormancy.

I use the language of dormancy and awakening here because as Hillis Miller, J. Hillis Miller remarks in the poets of reality,

quoting him, "Sleep in Stevens is the beginning, the radiant candor of pure mind without any content,

mind as it is when it faces a bare, unimagined reality."

That's perceptive to be sure, but I think that it's not technically correct to identify sleep with the beginning.

Sleep is not so much the beginning as the prelude to the beginning.

The difference seems utterly crucial to me.

I would go even further and insist that even the first stirrings of nature, the incipient moment of awakening, proceeds the beginning as such.

In any case, this is how I choose to make sense of the poem.

Not ideas about the thing, but the thing itself. Not ideas about the thing, but the thing itself.

That poem reads as follows.

"At the earliest ending of winter, in March a scrawny cry from outside seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it at a bird's cry at daylight or before in the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six, no longer a battered panache above snow. It would have been outside.

It was not the vast ventriloquism of sleeps, paper, faded mache. The sun was coming from outside."

That scrawny cry. It was a chorister who see, preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun.

Surrounded by its coral rings, still far away. It was like a new knowledge of reality.

If nature in Stephen's corpus means the inconceivable birth of the idea, or the awakening of mind and phenomenon, to one another, this is certainly a remarkable nature poem, a sort of concluding testament regarding an idea of nature that had been there from the very beginning.

This poem was composed toward the end of Stephen's life. It's the very last poem in Stephen's version of the collected poems of Wallace Stevens. Hence, it could hardly be more final in its statement.

But before I proceed to an analysis, a word about the poem's title.

Just as Stephen's abstract imagination should not be confused with the false imagination, so too what notes towards a supreme fiction calls the first idea,

should not be confused with the idea as representation. By virtue of the fact that it is opposed or juxtaposed to the thing itself, the word idea in this poem's title, not ideas about the thing but the thing itself, means something fundamentally different than what it means in the phrase, the inconceivable idea of the sun, or, quote, the first idea was not our own.

In the opening section of notes, idea means nothing less than the thing itself in its original appearance, while in not ideas, there is an implicit disconnection between idea and thing, which seems to suggest that the word ideas here signifies mental representation rather than phenomenal presentation.

Not ideas about the thing but the thing itself concludes Stephen's collection, the rock by harkening back to the opening poem of that collection, an old man's sleeping, which describes the state of sleep from which the speaker in the final poem is awakening.

The two worlds are asleep, are sleeping now, a dumb sense possesses them in a kind of solemnity, the self and the earth, your thoughts, your feelings, your beliefs and disbelieves, your whole peculiar plot. The redness of your reddish chestnut trees, the river motion, the drowsy motion of the river are.

The aboriginal correlation then between mind and phenomenon is affirmed rather boldly and unambiguously in both of these poems, the self and the earth, share the same slumber and the same awakening. In one case, both are asleep in the late autumnal season, in the other case, both are beginning to stir from that sleep.

But what is the nature of this awakening or this awakening of nature as it figures in this poem not ideas about the thing but the thing itself?

It is first and foremost an awakening of the mind, the mind awakens to the fact that what seemed to be inside of it in fact comes from outside.

The scrawny cry and the dawning sun are not pure ideas in a self enclosed, solipsistic thought machine, they are not images or representations in the dream world of sleep's faded paper machine. They are the things themselves as they appear to a thoroughly inventilized or winter-ified state of mind.

To the extent that they originate outside the mind these things in their first dawning are altogether transcendent in the phenomenological sense of the term, namely they are beyond the mind.

Nevertheless, the mind reduced to its wintry essentialism participates in the process of their birth for what is born here is nothing less than a new knowledge of reality.

It is a last line of verse of the poem. A new knowledge of reality, the knowledge namely that self and earth mind and phenomenon share the same nature.

This knowledge is the reality of that transcendence.

It seems critical to me that not ideas refuses to be a poem about new beginnings.

It seeks out instead the moment of extreme earlyness, the moment before the beginning, it speaks not of spring,

but of the earliest ending of winter, the time is early March, the birds cry occurs at daylight or before, the cry is a chorister who see preceded the choir.

The sun while rising is, quote, still far away, everything in the poem points to or evokes a mysterious antecedents with respect to both beginnings and ends,

as if the real in itself could come forth only by virtue of its own anticipation of itself.

In effect, the poem places us at the heart of the inconceivable priority of the real.

Evoked in the birds' crony pre-donned cry is that ever-receding anteriority from whose matrix the visible and the invisible, the self and the earth, the inside and the outside, the idea and the thing, the real and the unreal come forth in their primal equivalents.

For a suspended instant between the states of sleep and wakefulness, of night and day, of winter and spring, a unity that subsequently gets dispersed in ordinary experience is momentarily recovered.

This is as close as the poet will come to the paradise that Adam lost even prior to his fall from grace.