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