In part 4 I ended with this:

So what is the thing itself? A question of course. That’s why it isn’t either a subject or an object. A thing is the foundation which allows concepts to take form and so, of course, is pre-conceptual and why, at best, poetry can only aim its letters and hope to illuminate the invisible door by the sparks contact ignites.

I’ve been bothered by that since shortly after I wrote it (I was trying to go to sleep when the “botheration” surfaced). It is both true and not-true and the not-true bit worries me like a terrier at a towel. Even in my dreams that night, growl, growl, growl.

Then yesterday I was reading The Necessary Angel by Wallace Stevens.

Only recently I spoke of certain poetic acts as subtilizing experience and varying appearance: “The real is constantly being engulfed in the unreal…[Poetry] is an illumination of a surface, the movement of a self in the rock.”

I put the book down because it made me think of what a “thing” is and how an understanding of poetry contributes to our understanding of the nature and content of “thingness.”

A “thing” is a question in the sense that by orienting to the world in the questioning mode one makes possible Stevens’ subtilizing as well as the illumination of Stevens’ surface (or the door I referenced in the final paragraph of section 4 quoted above). A thing is not the words of the question, not the verbal question. A thing-in-itself, at least as far as a human being (also a thing-in-itself) can communicate the pre-linguistically experienced world, is a questioning stance. It is a way of experiencing the world that is, evolutionarily, our main way of assessing the world (including the world of our selves). Reason and language are late-comers.

The thing-in-itself that I experience during my morning walk is a questioning of many things: boundaries, kinship, danger, usefulness, pleasure potential. The thing-in-itself becomes a “rock” when I create an answer, and especially when I communicate that answer to myself (think about it) or others (talk/write about it). Poetry can undermine the current “answer” and re-open the “questioning.” This is why a thing-in-itself escapes the subject-object dichotomy, because for that decision to have been made, the thing-in-itself must have disappeared into the concept “rock.” As Stevens puts it, the real disappears into the unreal.

I would argue that a rock is just as real as the thing-in-itself, but not today. All I want to say today is that the rock and the thing-in-itself that I experience pre-linguistically are separate “things” despite their obvious relationship. That is, words are also “things” in the phenomenological sense. But, like I said, not today.