Strega told me the seal of day never caught on with humankind. Always, she whispered, there were little high energy packets of resistance, stinging nettles, an absence, upon which the overweening light stumbled. It’s this. How the borderland came to be—the earth-sky broke open. She said, now a little light kick tips dreams into the cup of our heads.

Dark is only possible. A broken horizon invalidates the warranty.

Of course this was before she passed over the sill, tipping pot over tea kettle, her black skirt catching wind, pillowing to cushion her fall. Still, once she’d died things she’d tell me made much more sense. For example, the dark she tells me, you’ll find the odor of sanctity is the pale purple of Neptune’s rose.

I thought I’d test that one so to the dark I went nose first. The edges of day and night, more like the air above a frying mushroom. I’m telling you.

It (nobility) is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature.The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.

What really interests me in the essay is the assumptions Stevens’ makes about imagination. He has a poem “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” in which he says

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one…
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

I want to be careful here because, despite Stevens’ apparent conversion to Catholicism on his death bed, I suspect what he was agreeing to and what the attending Priest thought he was agreeing to was rather different.  For one thing, the fact that there was a realm in which Stevens could equate imagination with a divine entity seems a little different from the divine entity postulated by Pope Benedict XVI and probably quite different from the Pope that was reigning at the time of Stevens’ dust-up with cancer. In fact the equation of imagination with the divine sounds a lot more like Carl Jung than Joseph Ratzinger.

Regardless, this idea of what imagination is lets us know it was of critical importance to Stevens.  In “The Noble Rider” he says that

the imagination adheres to reality, but, also, that reality adheres to the imagination and that the interdependence is essential.

This posits imagination and reality as mutually necessary but disparate forces/entities. The idea that imagination is a force independent of the world (reality) is a common enough assumption in the West. It underpins much of what we think we know about the world and our place within it. Stevens’ narrative that results from the assumption is to posit a place for the poet that is most certainly at least semi-divine, which is why he is so interested in rehabilitating the concept of nobility. The struggle between imagination and reality is the engine (the force) which makes art transformative and changes society.

In the first quote above, this force, which he identifies in the essay as “nobility” manifests as the pressure imagination exerts as it “adheres” to reality, as it narrates the nature of nature.  Nobility of person is the individual’s part of the more universal or general Mind/Imagination (supreme fiction). It is this general Mind that reminds me so much of Jung’s Collective Unconscious and what I think Stevens’ meant when he said “god.”

Imagination, for Stevens, is both a thing and a force. This seems to be the case throughout the essay and, although not as thoroughly thought out as many of the Phenomenologists who also write about imagination, it seems to follow the same basic line. A “thing” is not an object contained within the concept that is its name, but a more of a thing-in-itself, a force that forever escapes our attempts to contain it.

There is a line near the end of “The Noble Rider:” “A poet’s words are of things that do not exist without the words.” I am not at all saying that Stevens’ was a Phenomenologist but rather that the focus on forces in Stevens’ thinking led to some of the same places that the focus on events led Phenomenologists. If imagination is a force that contends with reality, that posits at least two basic “substances” and creates duality narratives of the white/black, raw/cooked sort. It also makes possible a third world, which mediates the two forces. This is the world of words, or art. This is the world of things in the Phenomenological sense. It is the words that attach us to reality but in such a way as to also attach reality to the imagination.

Albeit, Stevens never saw either imagination nor reality as possible without the other (at least in a world without humans or other imagining beings in it), but it is still a world riven and eternally struggling. In this he was very much of his time and place. For me though, I cannot help but wonder how the narrative would work if imagination and reality are not two but one force. One materially driven force, at least at the level of organization that can support human life. I keep coming back to photons and waves. I know it seems like two but it isn’t. It’s one. Then, there is only reality and imagination is a part of it. So it couldn’t be narrated as a battle, but could be narrated as something akin to fetal development, or perhaps the odd and curious development of the first “cell” wall – something entirely unprecedented but nevertheless a function of known forces.

Anyway, the point is just that if imagination is taken out of the dual world of a soul’s battle with reality, then how will the narrative go? That is my question.

For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores,
Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good,
To sound the constitution of just wards,
Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood.

Relieved of soul, the dropping-back of dust,
Their usage, pride, admitted within doors;
At home, under caved chantries, set in trust,
With well-dressed alabaster and proved spurs
They lie; they lie; secure in the decay
Of blood, blood-marks, crowns hacked and coveted,
Before the scouring fires of trial-day
Alight on men; before sleeked groin, gored head,
Budge through the clay and gravel, and the sea
Across daubed rock evacuates its dead.

Geoffrey Hill here, here and here

Two slim books of poetry arrived for me today. Both are by Michele Glazer. I feel as if I may have met another.

This poem is from Aggregate of disturbances.

Moon Casings

The full moon is not beautiful
and the headaches when her head
was bent that way
proved matter less stable than we thought.
The full moon that could tell —
could swell with meaning — until the order of words
failed in her.

                There's how it got there —
how it got to gather mass and be intruder
who might occlude cognition. Balance
would fail her. The full moon tells a story,
a chronology of movement
toward the center and out again.
The children — who have no name
for it — draw pictures —

              Moon upon moon — we are drawn
into the dense and glowing center, cast
there at the white shore of cells,
the location of where she is where
there is no backwards and no
future and the nurses were kind
to warn her when it was slivered out
she would hear insider her head the sound of it
assuming the very shape of
things at the edge throw the edge
into dispute and suggest something beyond
the full moon is not beautiful and the rind —
slim moon — the surgeon left
might not possess that critical
mass it needs to rise
again — he says — leaving
all things aside —

Then it swelled up
the sack of tears
but it wasn't punctured
I'll keep it in a little
Greco-Roman vase
he'll bring it to my house
triumphant elephant of pain!

and there are brilliant moments of clarity, breath-catching in their honesty

The objective and determining mind is a neat trick.
Cosmopolitan wisdom may be the best of our
canastras. The self-determining mind may be
a cheap trick. Convinced of the contrary I pondered
the country's internal crises and observed adrift on
the town's principal river a sardine can.

She is a political poet who writes about the fractured world of Europe in the build up to the second world war. She was born in 1930 to into an Italian Jewish educated and politically active family.

She committed suicide in 1996.

   Here, skinny blonde chicks wear blue
   jeans, ironed muscle shirts
   and shake yoga-defined booty

and

   Two boys explode from a just
   parked car. In the ditch
   a willowy branch becomes

   an unwieldy sword in a war fought
   and long decided before
   their parents unfold and resume control.

For example, here is one that is the best evocation of female aging within this Euro-American cultural space that I have ever read.

                    And the dawning will be
that string of pearls you wear always untied on your pearly
thinning neck, o! the
muffled bones that
press in the excited dazed laughter. And you
will wear bandages on those tendons
snapped by the fury of loving
joyfully.

Here is another, one that comes right after in the edition I am reading.

                         of your oh nothing is the world and
   nothing
said is your word, kept on its diagonal
axis by the steps of illiterates. And beyond any saying is
   the true
schoolbook. Summer smiles in a sweet rustle of soft
green leaves, but the darkness of its weaving I won't tell.
And my necklace of ideals (only the earth knew the shore
it lapped while men squeezed the flower) is a dream
more real than your candied light pressed in today's
   machine.

The way she breaks apart linguistic expectation allows for the strands that string the pearls to take a place in the construction of meaning.

the strings that bind and order, visible

How cool is that.

The second bit seems to me to speak of that silence I am reading about in Sara Maitland’s book. That same silence I so want for myself. So tomorrow on my break at work I will be reading poetry at the Starbucks across the street. One way to survive.

War Variations by Amelia Rosselli, translated from the Italian by Lucia Re and Paul Vangelisti

Still, rain sputtered against the hills all day. In the slip stream of the car
rabbit brush flicked yellow, shaking out the unaccustomed shower.
From ridges, wet tunneled down to the belly of the plateau
toward the Columbia, rills, rivulets, old basalt scars bubbling again. A coyote
streaked by leaving a vapour trail. Slap and tingle, rain at high speed,an open window,

the smell of sage curled over the hood and tumbled
bonelessly into the back seat. But with all that, it was the horizon that grinned.
Under the lip of a scout cloud tracking far out
along the eastern horizon a wedge of rainbow showed
south and another to the north. Widely spaced coloured teeth: as I drove
between them, over the tongue of the horizon, the last of the light gleamed.