I’ve been trying to read Poetry and the Fate of the Senses by Susan Stewart and frankly I’m having trouble getting past the introductory chapters which, amongst other things, lay out the assumptions that are likely to underpin all further argument.

Here’s the fundamental question it makes me ask: What does “meaning” actually mean?

And yes I get that it is somewhat of a meaningless question – a tautology, as it were. But you see that’s, what the book feels like.

For this post, let me back up for a minute and give you a very basic image that I use to imagine abstraction and how it works. It is my hope that the image will make explaining my problem with this book’s set-up more obvious.

Image a black screen. On the screen near the lower center is a white globe. That white globe is the human body and all its doings, including the apprehension of the world, its assessment and consequent behavioural modification – those things we normally call a mind. Now imagine that the black screen is full of energy packets zooming around. Each of those packets has a very specific shape – triangles, cubes, rhomboids, etc. The white ball has a number of openings that conform to some of the shapes but not to others.

Here is the first layer of meaning. The shapes of energy packets in the black screen beyond the white ball that are not matched by the shapes in the white ball are meaningless. They are invisible, untouchable, silent, tasteless, etc. This layer of meaning is shared by all forms that endure for any length. Complex chemicals “recognize” some other chemicals and not others. Those ones are meaningful to the complex chemical because it can recognize them. This is not self awareness, but it is recognition.

In human beings this layer of meaning is ever present. In this sense there is no moment in the life of a human being in which the universe is meaningless since there is never a time when the basic chemical and sensual recognitions and processes are not ongoing. This has a good deal of impact on Stewart’s fundamental image of darkness and night as formless, with no boundary and therefore not allowing any intersubjectivity or an ongoing dialectic.

Second image: Along with the white sphere there is now a smaller blue sphere. The two spheres are connected; the blue sphere is dependent upon the white one. At the level of mind that starts to create self-aware abstractions (that is meaningful recognitions that endure long enough for those recognitions to be called aware, and be manipulable by the imagination), mini “worlds” are created. A mentally constituted mini world is a blue sphere. The first order meanings that are always ongoing go through a further process if they are neurologically active enough (firing time crosses a time threshold). This later process is founded on the earlier processes but are projected onto a screen of their own – and a mini world is created to rotate, grasp, assess, manipulate the few “recognitions” that are part of the being’s current concern.

What the body does is posit a smaller “body”, limiting the “variables” so that a specific concern can be addressed in a simplified, but still recognizable “field”. This is an abstraction and the blue sphere.

The thing is that once inside the world of the blue sphere the same process can be accomplished and a new tertiary set of spheres be postulated and manipulated. By their nature, these imitation “bodies” – which are abstractions and simplifications – feel like a total world in themselves. But these small blue worlds cannot function as whole worlds, anymore than a virgin can know what sex is like by reading the Kama Sutra. The risk is that the blue sphere “forgets” its connection (and dependency) on the the white sphere. This is when abstractions take on a life of their own and often get completely outside the bounds of reality – and, often, polite society. (Think about the abstraction – women are the source of trouble in men’s lives – when you create a world out of that, you can easily forget that women are also the source of new men (baby boys), the source of much pleasure, and posit a world in which women don’t need to exist – e.g. monasticism. Look at the trouble that has got the Catholic Church into.)

Here is a real world example: Ask yourself the question, How can I live a meaningful life? An abstract-generating question. You might think about ethics, or pleasure, or narrative, or a number of other areas in human life, but in an attempt to answer such a question you are unlikely to include questions like what shall I cook for dinner tonight  or  I wonder who’s scratching at the door. These last two are concerns of the white sphere, but not of this particular blue sphere generated by my question.

But imagine now that you get caught up in this particular blue sphere and your connection is something deep and profound. Then your tummy rumbles. The concern for supper becomes not a concern temporarily set aside, but an intrusion, even a threat to the integrity of the small blue “world”. If you cannot “remember” that the abstract blue world you created to deal with this question of meaning is just an abstracted small portion of the larger real world (the white sphere), then any “foreign” thoughts threaten the new world. In that moment, the unknown presenting itself becomes an act of war.

So back to Stewart: Her abstract world – her blue sphere – is language devoid of bodily sources of meaning.

But I disagree. Night is not formless. The unconscious is merely unaware, not empty. Language is not “a counter to the oblivion of darkness”. I doubt whether language (or poetry) counters anything at all – that is, it isn’t in a combative relationship with the body from which it originates. What combat is created, what need to counter the unseen, comes from this abstraction taking its role as a “world” literally and forgetting to dissolve in the face of the larger needs of the originating body.