Introducing Wallace Stevens in 2012

The first known use of the word beatnik is 1958 (Merriam Webster). If Wallace Stevens was not one since he died in 1955, might it mean that to be a beatnik in 1958 was to embody the un-embody-able in that elusive space between Stevens's meanderings in reality and imagination? And, was to be a beatnik to seek within oneself beyond the hegemony of the domestic enclosure for what is real in what is not but was there, much like dying in the act of leaving one room or space for a different room or space? Of the influences Wallace Stevens has on American living and the world in its allness is the act of giving something only he can give, himself, over and over again. No space or time constrains Wallace Stevens's body of words, which in the moment of speech changes the world in which one lives.

In the moment of speech

Wallace Stevens and Description Without Place.

The surfactant of metaferocity, an act of

 unrelenting intensity like a storm at sea.

Abstract

            Receiving a National Book Award for his poetry, Wallace Stevens, speaks of a poet somewhat unwillingly stepping out of his cavern questioning why he must thank the people who dragged him out of his "cavern or whatever" to accept the award. Addressing the judges outside his "cavern or whatever" may be what some critics describe as a not so subtle inference to Plato's Republic and Socrates, the would-be philosopher king captive in his origins in society. Recent research reaches beyond contemporary interpretations of Plato's political philosophy and Wallace Stevens's visible and hidden self in a half-open cave of the self. This paper investigates inferences that tickle the senses with possible connections for Stevens's description without place as his "cavern or whatever" in the instant of speech, in the words and word forms of an elusive accessible surface of a thing that is, is not, and was there.

            Stevens suggests that poems are particles of a larger poem—the poem in which the poet walks. The connections found between his body of work, his poetic oeuvre, and the description without place where his words are formed and transformed is an example of an unrelenting wave of metaphors; The central poem is the poem of the whole ... / ... the roundness that pulls tight the final ring.

            Three lines from Canto II in Wallace Stevens's "The Primitive Like an Orb" from The Auroras of Autumn guide the discussion to tease out description without place and set a stage for future research as it relates to Plato's political philosophy of the cave and Stevens's "cavern or whatever".

                        In the instant of speech,

The breadth of an accelerando moves,

Captives the being, widens—and was there.

            Wallace Stevens, The Primitive Like an Orb, Canto II (CPP 377)

Introduction

            The poem title, "The Primitive Like an Orb", singles out "The Primitive" and not "Primitives" or "A Primitive", one of many Primitives. The Primitive, according to Webster's II New College Dictionary (878) can be one of multiple interpretations that include Western Christianity, philosophical, political, cultural, and voices of modern art and new literary historians. Because the argument is couched in interpretations of Plato's political philosophy of the cave, The Primitive is considered in part as inference to that period of time. Roger L. Huard argues that interpretations of Plato's word forms and word use should be made based on the act in its proper time and not of imposed Western Christianity mindsets. Huard (19) discounts the Christian mindset that interprets Plato's rendition of "what goes on in the mind was somehow distinct or detached from what goes on in the body" to explain Plato's periagoge as a "full turning around of the body from the shadows and towards the mouth of the cave." The language of the period is specific to the physical act of turning around of the body away from the shadows and towards the mouth of the cave.

            Huard's approach is the guide for considering the period of the word use for its interpretation. Although some contemporary readers might view Stevens as anti-Christian in his act of poetry, his poetry for the purpose of this paper does not engage with what Webster defines, "a belief that civilization is evil, or that the earliest period of human history was the best."

            Stevens was engaged in discourse whether or not in person with a developing language of modern art and his poesis a form of exploring the poetic act of language for a new modernism. Modern word forms in style and idea of thin and thick layers of thinking are disengaged from the interpretations of Christian churches to movements that try to adapt church teachings to modern revolutions in science and philosophy. Wallace Stevens's voice as modernist thinker and reciprocal influences of writers, painters, and philosophers readily available during its development is the framework for this writing to support interpretations at the time Stevens was selecting words and word forms to use in "The Primitive Like an Orb" (377).

Finding metaphors and analogies. Of the definitions readily available, the one most suited to this discussion for Primitive is "a word or word element from which another word or inflected form of the word is derived" (Webster 878); such that a poet uses a word's newly-derived form to engage in the early development of poetry as an act of modernism.

            Merle E. Brown (122) sets a stage to help understand from Stevens's prose how he develops ground rules that preclude clarification. Brown highlights Stevens's "repetition of himself with minor variations of words to cancel out" any apparent clarification of what the ever-changing forms and order do to confound meaning. Moreover, Brown describes Stevens's repetitive words as pure sound and "intellectual confusion" in that the new words and their forms do not take on added meaning. Brown suggests that Stevens illustrates this best in his inability to stop talking, referencing "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" (877-878) with its an and yet, and yet, and yet—useful abstractions in repetitive variations of word forms.

            Novel writer Stanislaw Lem publishes his 1961 word forms like the egg as metaphor for library in a shell of Solaris (111) where thinkers go to contemplate the descriptive terminology to illustrate the behavior of the ocean. The words readily available in the egg, the descriptions, are clumsy and inadequate yet useful abstractions for potential Solaris visitors or inquisitors, according to Lem's character 'Kelvin' who is reviewing the writings of Giese; the describer of the history of Solaris. The stage for academic pursuit at Solaris is much like one might find in a library archive at Yale or Harvard. The metaphor of egg for body of work within the universe of Solaris suggests a contained context, an egg yolk with a shell. If words and word forms used for poetry are the body of work for a larger poem, then a poet's oeuvre becomes the shell of its parts, the particles Stevens tells us make up the larger poem. "The Primitive Like an Orb" then, as a title to a poem might infer a sphere of influence such as found in an academic setting, an egg or oeuvre of words and word forms defined by historians to mean body of work, and the intentional use of words and their forms as metaphor to describe a new modern language in which the words and inflected form of the word is derived.

Using the metaphor. If Stevens is indeed engaged in formulating the language of a new poetic modernism, then the word Ordinary in the title of prose staging an evening at Yale transcends periods of time and cultural orders of academia in ways much like the word Primitive transcends the hegemony developing in a new modernism in the title "The Primitive Like an Orb." How often do we hear the expressions, "Close your eyes and visualize for a moment, and listen closely in order to visualize the words." This is a process of seeking abstractions within the mind inherent in the learning environment to help confound the word or consider its absence.

            Think about what one might visualize, seeing through the eye of the orb—the body of work inherent in a sphere of influence. Your task is to combine metaphors from two different poems written by Wallace Stevens, one bent on purging oneself of anything false as a purpose of academia and one on the journey to form words into language for a new modernism. Your new title might be the sequel to "The Primitive Like an Orb" and "An Ordinary Evening at New Haven." The new title might read something like "The Ordinary Orb"; reflecting a transformation to societal or poetic-peer acceptance and use of a language for a new poetic modernism. The new title is metaphor for an ordering of Stevens's variations of words or word elements designed as a baseline from which other words or inflected form of the words are created. Thus, we find a transformation from the Primitive to the Ordinary couched in a sphere of poetic influence at the proper time in the development of a language for the modern poet.

Calling attention to the metaphor. We might suspect the word Primitive is used as metaphor or analogy because the word "Like" follows it in the title. Daniel R. Schwarz credits Stevens with metaferocity, the rapid sequencing of metaphors, comparing it guardedly to visual media of art and movies; suggesting that in the titles lie the quest for metaphors and ways of seeing, more so than the object itself. Schwarz compares Stevens's act using "present participles" in words equivalent to techniques of painters Matisse and Picasso, and sculptor Rodin defining one's own position (249).

            According to Schwarz, Rodin and Picasso influenced Stevens with modern realizations of the "uncertain or discordant self" such as found in "Hoon" (51) actively describing and defining his own position or perspective in "Tea at the Palace of Hoon". The metaphor set forth by one's line of sight from the center of his own position, with all the things that orbit around the center of one's own universe suggests a possible reference to the word "Orb" which among other meanings includes "eye" or "egg" as library in the center of Stanislaw Lem's Solaris. On first reading, Schwarz and Brown may agree that Stevens's purpose is to call attention more to the effect of the language than to the poem or object of which the poem addresses.

            To behave "Like an Orb" around Schwarz's discourse on ways of seeing through language, Brown's discourse on repetitive sounds and Stevens's act of poetry in which the poem becomes the world in which one lives and how language accomplishes that act for the poet, suggest a developing modernism with poetry at its origins of language for a new world in which to live; creating a whole new stage for Stevens's use of metaphors to tease out or not "caverns or whatever" and meanderings circumventing, orbiting, a philosopher king who has difficulty leaving the poem in which he walks. The difficulty leaving the poem in which one lives and walks is evidenced by Plato's suggestion, or guarded mockery of the situation according to some critics, that Socrates should have been king yet is executed upon his return to help Others hear what he hears in his orb.

            We have our baseline for a possible metaphor housed in the title. The context, or sphere of influence, the Orb, is a shared language in its development for a new modernism. The focus is on the word and its forms from which other words and their forms are derived. Unpacking the Title helps provide insights for a reading of three lines that are arguably the most non-nothingness lines in "The Primitive Like an Orb"  (377).

                        In the instant of speech,

The breadth of an accelerando moves,

Captives the being, widens—and was there.

                        Wallace Stevens, The Primitive Like an Orb, Canto II

Methods

            The method of defining word use that is applied to deconstruct the title "The Primitive Like an Orb" is applied to three lines from Canto II; creating a freedom from the narrowness inherent in the words alone. The deconstruction places discourse in the period when language for modern art with poetry as an act of modernism was its proper time. The investigation seeks to explore concepts of meanings inherent in metaphors intrinsic to the word forms, language, and selected ways of seeing that Wallace Stevens selects perhaps to open a mind to repetitive meanderings.

Playing things backward. Thinking about defining word use and providing a contemporary example of the use of metaphor, Stevens's metaferocity influenced new wave and avant garde artistic expression much like contemporary modern artists, poets, and philosophers influenced his own. In 1975, an American performing artist group "Talking Heads" hoped to help society understand things and play them backward—parking lots to oceans of daisies; factories to fields of flowers. Playing backward seems a little like Stevens metaphor covering his rock of nothingness with leaves; As if nothingness contained a metier, / A vital assumption, an impermanence / In its permanent cold, an illusion so desired / That the green leaves came and covered the high rock, ... According to Wikipedia, "Talking Heads" only top 10 hit appeared on a 1985 release Speaking in Tongues. The potential for metaphors inherent in the words as names for a band and its series of songs in Speaking in Tongues, include but are not limited to a few ideas of dominion or influence suggested in interviews with the musicians—the name inspired by the concept of news announcers who channel what others write, all content, no action; forecasting the possibility of privately-owned social media style lookalike broadcast news programming in which a carefully listening viewer considering the punctuations of the voice can through its treatment and captivating expression understand in the moment of utterance which candidate the owners are supposedly subliminally positioning for political office to protect and build an empire.

            The metaphoric potential itself is the world in which the performing artists walk, hoping to help people know how to live and what to do. Words put to music, even talking to music, or talking alone as Stevens apparently cannot stop doing, provide the repetitive an and yet, and yet, and yet that in a brief moment punctuate the giant of nothingness (380) that looms a magnet on the horizon (379) / imposing power by the power of his form (380) / an abstraction given head, / A giant on the horizon, given arms, / A massive body and long legs, stretched out, / A definition with an illustration, not / Too exactly labelled, a large among the smalls / Of it, a close, parental magnitude, / At the center on the horizon, concentrum, grave / And prodigious person, patron of origins.

An ordinary existence. What is at first expressed as non-existent, insignificant, nothingness develops a gigantic life in lines that hint at the power of the giant by the power of his form: the doctor, the prescriber, the describer, the philosopher king wearing the label of authority bigger than society or society itself, bigger than the individual, a patriarch of great influence and lack of consequence or condition of quality of existence, a prolific and serious savior-type and sponsor of origins, but careful to not cross the Western Christianity belief that everything from the origins of man are what Plato speaks of as the supreme good of the philosopher who should be king.

            A friend to the author is captivated by the expression, "Life is a never ending eddy of despair, punctuated with moments of false hope." So confusing it is to think about having no sense of control over one's destiny whether it is to have the gigantic life of the philosopher king or the ordered ordinary in the giant's nothingness reflected on the cave wall on the horizon within the world in which the poet lives. Perhaps it is confusing because this writing is secular yet open to modern belief systems of free will and the possibilities inherent in positive projections and outcome of high expectations of the period in which Stevens is developing his body of work. If these words sound an alignment with a non-secular modern thinking of the period during which Wallace Stevens transformed his orb, it is because the supreme good of the philosopher who would be king in words spoken in Plato's Republic is the basis of intrinsic political or activist word forms found by unpacking three lines in Canto II of Stevens's poem "The Primitive Like an Orb" (377).

                        In the instant of speech,

The breadth of an accelerando moves,

Captives the being, widens—and was there.

                        Wallace Stevens, The Primitive Like an Orb, Canto II

Unpacking the first line, In the instant of speech, appears to address the immediacy of the spoken word in which Stevens describes, a word form or thing that "is, is not, and was there." A speech is typically presented on a stage. The stage in Plato's Cave described in Republic and interpreted by Roger L. Huard relied on whispers, mumblings, and sounds associated with shadows on the wall. The audience was chained to chairs unable to see what was moving behind the block wall at their backs that blocked everything but the objects that moved above it between a fire and the stage wall where the shadows loomed large and small. The cave and its shadows are the world in which the audience lives, an enclosed world in which what is, reality for the audience, is controlled by another. If someone escapes the cave and walks toward the nature and looming sun beyond the fire, a new understanding of reality is found, but the escapee cannot come back to the cave to guide others to the light, nor can he leave his origins in society (6-10).

            Martin Heidegger, according to Johanna Skibsrud (9), like Stevens emphasizes function and material of language in part for a manner of living and being in the world as a whole. One might consider Heidegger using his 1927 "tool analysis" to explain the repetitious mumblings or words associated with shadows in the cave or for that matter the poem in which the poet walks. The act of listening from a confined seat is an act of going to the word well in the word woods, or in this case the word cave-seat enclosure, even if one does not speak the words does not think or anything relating to language. In the "cavern or whatever", the mumblings bounce off the stage wall as echoes of the people behind the stone fence behind the audience between the fire and the stage wall. Features and attributes of sound and image are associated with the shadows; and attached by a captive audience to round out the illusions of the shadowed world, the captive's reality.

            Justin Quinn (4) suggests that this "imperial" enclosure of Plato's Cave is escaped by the figure Wallace Stevens valorizes to face "the open horizon of nature with all its hermeneutic uncertainty." Stevens sets a political stage of ruin for his poem "Repetitions of a Young Captain" (271-274) in Transport to Summer. Stevens's stage had been destroyed by a new political and marshall transformations: A tempest cracked on the theatre. Quickly / The wind beat in the roof and half the walls. / The ruin stood still in an external world.

            Simon Critchley (36) suggests that Stevens's lines in the 1942 "Of Modern Poetry" The past is a souvenier / ...the theatre becomes a ruin..., and cites Friedrich Schlegel's remarks that fragments of poems written by modern poets, are dependent upon the modern audience at the moment they are written such as in Stevens's "Repetitions of a Young Captain". A new order of thinking about the new order is in store. Constantly, / At the railway station, a soldier steps away, / Sees a familiar building drenched in cloud / And goes to an external world, having / Nothing of place. There is no change of place / Nor of time. The departing soldier is as he is, / Yet in that form will not return. But does / He find another? The giant of sense remains / A giant without a body. If, as giant, / He shares a gigantic life, it is because / The gigantic has a reality of its own.

            Might we think of the giant of the sense remains as the enlightened prisoner who cannot discard what Merle E. Brown calls his historic imagination and association with the cave? A giant without a body / a reality of its own. Wallace's giant has two lives, the life one lives and the historic imagination that returns where one begins. So, the author pre-supposes that the giant returns with a reality of its own to the cave in Stevens's poem "The Plot Against the Giant" (5). In this poem, the giant is the yokel, the escapee from the cave; returning to enlighten the others who undo him for a gigantic life forever chained to the cave with civil odors, cloths besprinkled with colors and threads of society, and heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.

            The giant of the abstract nothingness is tamed as he sits again chained in a chair looking at the stage wall listening to the mumblings of the people walking behind the stone-wall between the fire and the stage wall where the shadows and mumbled speeches of the outside world become the reality once again. We have a definition of the instant of speech as it affixes to the language and image of the world in which we live.

           

Unpacking the second line, The breadth of an accelerando moves, appears at first to address a turning, a swerve, or a quickening. On second look, the freedom from narrowness is more like an embrace, a larger enclosure of acceptance of guided or orchestrated motions that influence limit-less possibilities.

            It may be useful to explain a lack of narrowness, a freedom from narrowness achieved through an orchestrated sequence of orations provided by peers and Dr. Michael Sexson to understand the shadows on Wallace Stevens's cavern walls referencing Plato's political cave.

            The stage is set thirty years prior to my partial freedom from narrowness, my guided immediate quickening that inspired me to look again at my experience sitting in a modern cave much like Plato’s confined to the raked seat observing a dance performance from which the only escape is to roll my eyes up to the theatre's chandelier and avoid the nonsensical chaos of nothingness on stage. In my historical imagination I recall rolling my eyes back down from the chandelier to the back wall of a stage.

            Townspeople run in desperate circles between a torch placed at stage front center and the back wall. My gaze is on the back wall where transforming shadows clarify for me perhaps why the dance performance title is “The townspeople thought him a monster, but he was really king.” While townspeople are running in small circles in the middle of the stage with the torch casting small shadows on the back wall, one small figure is running close to the torch and back to the wall making his shadow gigantic when he is close to the torch and very small when he is close to the wall. "Ah ha!" I think I understand.

            My narrow momentous "Ah ha!" understanding thirty years ago made some sense, "Oh, his big shadow makes him look like a monster and his small shadow reveals him as one of their own." It was not until my recent emersion in Wallace Stevens's poetry that I achieve in part a freedom from narrowness to consider the breadth of a would-be philosopher king coming back to Plato's cave hoping to help his friends only to be feared and contained by his friends in a society of his origins from and to which he can never leave or return—a gigantic leap from narrowness to not-so-narrowness, but nowhere near the gigantic intelligence almost.

            Titus Lucretius Carus in 'SUBSTANCE ETERNAL' canto in Of the Nature of Things speaks of widening rings as flaring spokes of light, nor glittering arrows of morning / suffering naught / To come to birth but through some other's death. / In sooth, that ring is thither borne along / To where 'twas once plunged headlong-thither, lo, / Unto the void whereto it took its start. Is this void whereto it took its start inferred by Gaston Bachelard, cited by Skibsrub (220), to be a half-open void and orb that widens the hidden and visible captive being in the instant of speech in the words from Heidegger's word well in which we seek the descriptions of what is, is not, and was there? Can this be the moves with accelerando, orchestrated guidance, the rapidly opening and closing entrance, the access to the half-open space and the intelligence almost that Stevens enters in "Description without Place" (296)?

            Johanna Skibsrud (112) defines "Stevens's "absolute zero degree of the real" within the realm of the subjective and linguistic; within a circular exploitation of the senses but not of the senses." Quoting Bachelard (220) explaining the contradiction in "The Poem as Icon" (446) from The Rock. Skibsrud renders Bachelard's space on the surface between what is and its predicate where "being wants to be both visible and hidden" and that "the movements of opening and closing are so numerous, so frequently inverted, and so charged with hesitation, that we could conclude on the following formula: man is half-open being" (222).

            If man is half-open being, able to escape the intelligence almost in this description without place movement of openings and closings so numerous topsy turvy hesitation-charged word form half-open being, then we have a definition for the accelerando moves and the freedom from narrowness in its accessible breadth where one explores possibilities.

Unpacking the third line, Captives the being, widens—and was there. If Stevens in his poem "The Latest Freed Man" (187) considers himself /At the center of reality, seeing it and the giant the magnet of ideas as they form into words that when spoken create a freedom from the narrowness of ignorance to a point of intelligence almost, then there is a basis for visualizing the spiraling journey of the poet between The Primitive and Ordinariness in their difference, as Heidegger might clarify as dif-ference, an ever widening breadth of inferences and how to live in the world. The journey closest to the torch behind Plato's stone fence behind the captive audience in the cave, or Stevens's sun, pushes the external world spoken words closest to the tightening final ring where the giant is largest, and thus the spiralling word well widens for an instant as the half-open man returns to Ordinariness away from the torch and the giant's shadow diminishes in size: what is, is not, and was there.

            Justin Quinn argues that Stevens arranges community and nature (90) to move between mountains and trees, dwellings and communities. The hero’s journey is shaped by and influences the shaping of its own reality; much like a theatre in which society represents to itself the world in which it lives, to be uprooted by the elements of nature—formed, and transformed, repetitiously to conform to a new order. The giant within Plato’s or an “imperialist” enclosure is in constant repeating variations in motion; moving in and away from the sun and the widest orbit engaged in Heidegger’s confrontation through language as the ‘house of Being’ in Rilke’s unifying ‘widest orbit’ that surrounds ‘all that is’ – which is, therefore in Heidegger’s words, ‘the Being of beings’ (Skibsrud 13 cites PLT 120).

            As I watch the monster on stage attempt to escape the gigantic life of its own making, Simon Critchley might couch the words in the performance title as fragments once written dependent upon the modern audience. Critchley tells us that the stage is the ruin of the audience—that my stage is of my own making as I closed my eyes to the stage and gazed up at the chandelier, as if nothing had happened as with the repetitions of the young captain in A tempest cracked on the theatre and a new order of thinking about the new order is in store. No change of place or of time, The giant of the sense remains / A giant without a body. If, as giant, / He shares a gigantic life, it is because / The gigantic has a reality of its own. 

            Heidegger, cited by Skibsrud (220), might explain that the repetition of the young captain, or the would-be philosopher king in my modern ruin, was "going to the well, going to the well through the woods, always going through the word well, through the word woods, even if he does not speak the words does not think of anything relating to language."

            Yet, in the language spoken or not lies the sphere of influence that ebbs and tides in punctuated quickening in a self-made ruin in which Critchley says modernist sit. If all of the insights proposed and cited in this writing are in part a form of orb, then how might one escape the pre-destiny of opportunity and possibilities, the gigantic life, if we must get back to the start from which we can never return, never leave, and simply be, not be, and have been there? Are not these words and their forms the mere essence of description without place?

Discussion

The failure of language. Two authors agree that Wallace Stevens uses the relationship between speech and the political via the ontology of vocal emissions. Alexander Keller Hirsch (1) positions the writing of Adriana Caverero and Simon Critchley alongside one another to find surprising insights that "peel off like sparks that fly from friction...moving from ontology to politics"
            * point of departure for both is the failure of logos, the failed promise of language

            * Critchley's focus is on poetry as the experience of failure

            * Cavarero's focus is a new perspective consigning meaning to the "vocalic

               sphere" in order to restore what is lost by the attention to language, namely the

               uniqueness of the speaker

            * both rely on disappointment with the injurious effects of language

            Cavarero suggests that words can restore what is lost by the attention to language,

namely the uniqueness of the speaker. In film studies lecture, Dr. Ronald Tobias called

attention to a culture so afraid of losing things that they would write the name of the thing, like writing the word chair repeatedly over the chair, in order to preserve it. The chair in Wallace Stevens’s “The Latest Freed Man’’ (187) represents as a word, a word for something that one is or is not afraid of losing like the pretty little banales one clearly sees from the center of reality. In the use of the words ‘the chair’ in the closing line, Stevens packs in the disappointment with the primacy of language to express the narrowness of historical imagination of things as they are, are not, and were.

Questioning between saying and doing. Robert B. Brandom (4) thinks about what he is doing when he is using language, a novel approach to inspiring meaning-use analysis (Shieh 1). Brandom approaches the effects of language in his lecture Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism. Modality and Normativity: From Hume and Quine to Kant and Sellars to claim that in order to understand the relation between how things merely are and how they must be or (a different matter) ought to be, one must look at what one is doing in saying how things are. Brandom's thinking about what one is doing, according to Sanford Shieh (1), inspires meaning-use analysis methods that incorporate the insights of its pragmatist critics; perhaps this could be aligned with repetitive word-forming to see from many perspectives. Daniele Porello (1) credits Brandom's work on the strong connection between logic and inference in its practice or abilities as grounded in the general practice of giving and asking for reasons; perhaps this could be aligned with the inability to stop talking because if the giant of nothingness cannot be described adequately in language, one must continue trying...

            But Merle E. Brown speaks of Stevens's "of repetition most master," continuously questioning within his head in preference to circumventing the scope of poetry which, according to Brown, is possibly because for Stevens the image, language, and senses negate reality. Daniel R. Schwarz (375) writes of U.S. politician and financier Robert Morris who speaks of the entanglements of the imagist and the linguistic, "From the origins of such terms as 'theory' (from theoria--to look at) and 'idea" (from idein--to see) to Plato's metaphor of the cave, the visual is both privileged and concealed in language." Schwarz reads Stevens "seeing beyond his word play, elusive syntax, difficult images, and/or seeming minimalism is a strong mimetic sense. And that mimetic sense was influenced by a strong response to modern painting in which he found images of his own quest to make sense of the world and himself."

The tension of intention and the poem as act. At first I thought Dustin Dallman's (2012) use of the term "intensional form" to be a French or misspelling of the term  "intentional." Whether a French or misspelling, the tension created in the act of poetry, the "poem as act"—an act to create tension, discomfort, and discourse in the middle ground is where the strong man vaguely seen, the giant of nothingness, entertains the gigantic life in this negative space. It is in this negative space where Johanna Skibsrud positions her orb for a doctoral dissertation "The nothing that is": An Ethics of Absence Within the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. Skibsrud (v) argues Wallace Stevens's intent for genuine politics of engagement. She too, believes that for Stevens, "transcendence is always, necessarily, bound by the acknowledged restrictions of human language and imagination and therefore by the reality of the perceivable world."

            The purpose of this paper was to consider potential connections that might be found in three lines of a Wallace Stevens poem to widen the orb of description without place. The modern writer of words, the creators of word forms, the intentional selection of words and their forms to describe and capture the essence, not the sense of what seems, but the essence of what is in that description without place creates a widening universe or if and then, an yet, and yet and yet; which through a transformation from The Primitive Like an Orb to Ordinariness in the acceptance and use of the words and their forms as a way to live in the modern world creates the absence of the thing itself in its replacement with the next thing, the next word derived for it. In its moment of speech it was there. The half open man is not all there at all times as the language of a modern world is created in words and word forms which in their absence transform the modern world. The use and acceptance of the language of a modern world implicitly wears on its novelty to be replaced by the half open next description without place and how to live in the modern world. The historical imagination in which the poet lives and walks and returns and cannot escape is what remains.          

Implications

            If this investigation is slightly or somewhat sound, as in the "an and yet, and yet, and yet" of verbal and visual punctuations to what is known or thought to be known about what is and what is not after it was, then Wallace Stevens continues to position the philosopher king of self in the final Canto, Canto XII of "The Primitive Like an Orb."

That's it. The lover writes, the believer hears,

The poet mumbles and the painter sees,

Each one, his fated eccentricity,

As a part, but part, but tenacious particle,

Of the skeleton of the ether, the total

Of letters, prophecies, perceptions, clods

Of color, the giant of nothingness, each one

And the giant ever changing, living in change.

                        Wallace Stevens, Primitive Like an Orb Canto XII

            It was 1993, eighteen years after "Talking Heads" played things back to their origins and thirty-plus years after Wallace Stevens layered leaves over his rock. I sat in an organizational communications class in a rural Montana university. The professor gave the class nine canto's on how to survive the continuing uncertainties of recession following an historically repetitive market crash, fuel shortages, cost of living hikes, skyrocketing unemployment, energy giants avoiding environmental protection regulations to save jobs. It seemed every ten years when regulations were to be met, another war in the middle-east prevented the U.S. government from enforcing regulations to mitigate energy production impacts on air quality and water resources. Billings, Montana continues to be listed as #3 or higher in the United States for CO³ emissions. Billings residents refer to the civil odor as the smell of money, air quality that turns white newly hung Christmas decorations putrid-yellow within 24 hours each year. What I didn't know at the time is that Dr. Stephen Coffman hoped to orchestrate what to do and how to live in order to help his students survive the next ten years within the breadth of accelerando moves in the orb (my use of poetic word forms) of energy empires.

            I took notes in that winter classroom.

            Today as I attempt to pull together the concepts of Plato's political cave and Wallace Stevens description without place, I pulled out the notecard kept all these years. In the instant of speech, like Wallace Stevens, I recite aloud unable to stop talking in my head a newfound meaning in the sound of the cantos on the surface of the note, like a Stevensian secular psalm, how to survive beyond the Ordinariness of 1993. Whatever the year or the "cavern or whatever", ignore or fill in the metaphors as you like how to live and what to do.

I

                                    metanoia - transform/align

                                                a. disengage from past

                                                b. disidentify with past demands

                                                c. disenchantment with past

                                                d. disorientation from the norm

II

                                    personal inner serenity

III

                                    behavioral flexibility - embrace change

IV

                                    autonomy - opposite of co-dependence

V

                                    self-disclosure

VI

                                    positive anticipation

                                                a. image the day positively - self fulfilling prophecy

VII

                                    internal locus of control

VIII

                                    forgiveness

IX

                                    heartiness - commitment

                                                a. control - believe you have influence

                                                b. challenge

                                                            Dr. Stephen Coffman, Organizational Communications

Works Cited

Brandom, Robert B. Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism. Oxford University P 2008. Print. Reviewed by Sanford Shieh, Wesleyan University. Reviewed by Daniele Porello, University of Amsterdam.

Brown, Merle E. Wallace Stevens. The Poem as Act. Detroit: Wayne State University P, 1970, Print.

Carus, Titus Lucretius. Of the Nature of Things. A Metrical Translation by WIlliam Ellery Leonard. The Project Gutenberg EBook . www.gutenberg.org. (2008) [EBook #785 produced by Levent Kurnaz and David Widger] [Express permission for all and any to use at will - printed text in MS Word Resources document]

Cavarero, Adriana. For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Stanford: Stanford University Press (2005): 262

Coffman, Stephen. Organizational Communications. Billings: Eastern Montana College. 1993 Lecture notes

Critchley, Simon. Things Merely Are. Philosophy in the poetry of Wallace Stevens.  New York: Routledge. 2005. Print

Dallman, Dustin. Negation and Realty. 2012. Blog

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

Hirsch, Alexander Keller. The Political Acoustics of the Poetic Imagination. Theory & Event 9.2 (2006): (review of both Caverro and Critchley). Article

Huard, Roger L. Plato's Ppolitical Philosophy. The Cave. New York: Algora Publishing 2007:19 Print

Lem, Stanislaw. Solaris. Trans. Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox. New York: A Harvest Book - Harcourt, Inc. 1961:

Porello, Daniele. Dialogue Games and Incompatibility Semantics. University of Amsterdam: Institute for Logic, Language and Computation. 2011. Abstract

Quinn, Justin. Gathered Beaneath the Storm. Wallace Stevens, Nature and Community. Dublin: University College Dublin P, 2002. Print

Setiya, Kieran. Imagining reality. Kieran Setiya on a book that not merely is. Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens by Simon Critchley (Routledge). The Philosophers' Magazine (2006): 89. Article

Shieh, Sanford. Review. Robert B. Brandom. Between Saying and Doing: towards an Analytic Pragmatism. Nortre Dame Philosophical Reviews: Wesleyan University P, (2009): E-Journal

Skibsrud, Johanna. "The nothing that is": An Ethics of Absence Within the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. Montreal: University de Montreal. 2012. Dissertation.

The Library of America. Wallace Stevens. Collected Poetry and Prose. New York: 1997  (On Receiving the National Book Award for Poetry 877-878) (Tea at the Palace of Hoon 51) (The Primitive Like an Orb 377) (Description Without Place 296) (The Latest Freed Man 187) (The Plot Against the Giant 5) (Of Modern Poetry 218) (The Poem as Icon 446). Print

Tobias, Ronald. Natural History Filmmaking Research Fundamentals. Bozeman: Montana State University Science and Natural History Filmmaking P, 2012. Lecture

Webern, Anton. Extrapolation 21 1980: 101-105

Wester's II New College Dictionary. Boston: Hougton Mifflin Co. 1999:878 Print

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_Heads Web

An Anecdote for a Salvage Ethnographer

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Context. In the context of deconstructing comparisons between Solaris and Wallace Stevens's approach to a 'poem is about poetry', may I lay a baseline for the concept that the poet himself cannot escape the descriptions of a predecessor. Wallace Stevens's words are in part inspired by the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and others. Stevens was not the only writer, poet, philosopher engaged in social discourse about the limitations of language to describe what is.

 

Background. Historically, according to words in print in university and scholarly settings, social and political imperialists set discourse as a measure of the value to any description. Is it not George Orwell (1949) who writes about his mid-twentieth century suspenseful novel 1984, that after all, "He who controls the past controls the future." Orwell sets the dystopian stage for newspeak in Oceania, a frame narrative for the crafting of words and descriptions as a political ideology of the totalitarian government.

The creation of newspeak is what Martin Heidegger (1971) might call going to the word 'well' and making a contribution in order to think about things related to newspeak. Heidegger goes so far as to describe the limitations of language, poetry, and thinking: detailing word 'wells' and word 'woods' and the absence of the words; where inherent in the absence of the words is the absence of thinking of anything related to the words.

About the same time, 1970, Merle E. Brown argues that an author of a poem of the mind in the act (Brown 62-84), Wallace Stevens, will "not allow, in this fictive but not fictitious world, for any blinking at the facts or for any pious hopes. All that poetic fiction provides beyond ourselves—and yet it is all we need, is indeed what we most need—is to chant 'for those buried in their blood, / In the jasmine haunted forests.' (Stevens CPP 226)."

While Orwell cautions about alternative futures, Brown suggests that in this enclosure of the jasmine haunted forest reminiscing, we will find poetry of the mind as an act, in part an historical imagination, influenced by what came before. This context—this enclosure of nature, a jasmine haunted forest, so well delivered by Wallace Stevens—is the context that relates to the enclosure(s) that houses "The Monsters" in Stanislaw Lem's Solaris.

Question. Poetry is the "Strength that is the strength of the sun" (Stevens CPP 187) as act—a contextual enclosure of words—to influence whose voices are heard and whose alternative futures are fulfilled, "How to live. What to do." (Stevens CPP 102).

Narrative. In 1961, Stanislaw Lem publishes his words about an egg as metaphor for library in a shell where thinkers go to contemplate the descriptive terminology (Lem 111) to illustrate the behavior of the ocean. The words, the descriptions, are clumsy and inadequate yet useful abstractions for potential Solaris visitors or inquisitors, according to Lem's character 'Kelvin' who is reviewing the writings of Giese; the describer of the history of Solaris.

From the egg and its shell on Solaris, Kelvin deals with his understanding of imagination and reality, in and of himself and in the histories provided by Giese. Heidegger might say that Kelvin is moving in and away from the sun, spiraling out past the descriptions and experiences through language as his 'house of Being', from his shell, from his level of comfort with what is presented to him through language, poetry, and thinking. It is this 'house of Being', which Heidegger refers to as Rilke's unifying 'widest orbit' that surrounds 'all that is'—which is, therefore 'the Being of beings (Skibsrud 13 cites Heidgger 120)."

Whether we think of this spiraling between what is and what is not as Heidegger's "dif-ference" or Derrida's "movement" (Skidsbrud cites Jarraway 1993), this movement of the mind around and about the metaphorical shadows in Plato's cave—shadows that confound our understanding of reality (Huard 2007)—is between what is the same and the Other and how we describe in words our thinking about what we learn about ourselves in middle ground, in the movement between, dif-ference. Solaris takes us on a journey of the hero, Kelvin, in his search between historical imagination and what is.

Kelvin has set his own stage, his ruin, his enclosure, his egg and shell inside an ocean and sea from which speaks a language tuned to his climate. He faces the men and women of the time (his passed wife) in everyday activities, his audience, his Other, and the movement and dif-ference. Simon Critchley (2005) suggests that this theatre that becomes a ruin is a "ruin in which we moderns sit." Qui fait fi des jolie banales! (Stevens CPP 187).

Segue. The remainder of this attempt to explore poetry of the mind as act—enclosures and giants—as a socio-political reality is the topic of the project, slated for a new blog.

To death, or intelligence almost, between Other and same.

Works Cited

Brown, Merle E. Wallace Stevens. The Poem as Act. Detroit: Wayne State University P. 1970. Print.

Critchley, Simon. Things Merely Are. Philosophy in the poetry of Wallace Stevens. New York: Routledge. 2005. Print.

Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Perennial, 1971. Print.

 Huard, Roger L. Plato's Political Philosophy. The Cave. New York: Algora P. 2007.

Jarraway, David. Wallace Stevens and the Question of Belief: Metaphysician in the Dark. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1993.

Skibsrud, Johanna. 2012. “The nothing that is”: An Ethics of Absence Within the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. Departement d’etudes anglaises. Universite de Montreal. Dissertation for “de Philosophiae Doctor (Ph.D.) en etudes anglaises.

The American Library. Stevens. Collected Poems and Poetry. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. 1997. Print