dark does not fall, it billows. At first it’s just a light smoke, a smudge of incense. Little dream in a patch of shade. It’s once it catches…enough to smoke you right out of time, she said.

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.

Wallace Stevens’ essay “The Noble Rider” is really about rehabilitating the concept of nobility and resiting it as “a force and not the manifestations of which it is composed.”

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.

Years ago I knew a woman who told me a story about a Salish woman we both knew. Briefly, the Salish woman would say “track bear” when she was pointing (or referring) to a bear track. She was a Salish speaker and the underlying sense of reality that was instilled in her early years (and was recorded in the rhythms and syntax of her first language) stayed with her. She explained (to the woman I once knew) when asked, that to say “track bear” is obvious since you see the track first and then you see the bear.

Little bits of knowledge like this are like prisms. Turned this way and that they break up what we thought was a singular modality. The relationship between what our bodies receive from the world and what we perceive, and then communicate to ourselves (let alone others) is like white light. It isn’t singular.

For humans there isn’t a case where the world is either about objects and subjects or about events. Demonstrably it is about both. The decision about what to make central (either the subject/objects or the events – the space between) is a cultural decision made in the development of a group of people in space over time. What interests me is the movement a mind can make between bear track and track bear. This is the world of the liminal, the cultural translator, the mind that slips on its own (un)certainties.

I’ve been rather sick for several days. Bad, bad headache and since my daughter is also sick, it’s been frustrating. Can’t think, but still have to operate. Can’t even read much because it ratchets up the pain after not very long. Still, I did read “The Noble Rider” which is an essay by Wallace Stevens from his collection of essays called The Necessary Angel.

I mentioned this book in the August 17 post on Phenomenology, poetry and sense when I felt a connection between the “thing” and what Stevens’ thinks about poetry, imagination and reality. Mind slippage of the sort that track bear track represents is what happens (or what enables) when the certainties of event/or/subject-object are fractured. The slivers left, the “questioning” I talk about in the last thing-post is like the rainbow the prism enables us to see. It is important to remember that the prism doesn’t create it, by the way, it just makes visible to us the constituent frequencies of what normally appears as “white.”

This is why I think that the rock is just as real as the thing-in-itself (last paragraph of that Aug 17 post). White light is not unreal. Neither are the constituent frequencies the “really real” light. They are just as much a product of our visual equipment and our resultant interpretation as is white light. What seems critical to me is that our visual equipment obviously includes eyes, nerves, cerebral processing modules as well as the world of electro-magnetic frequencies and photons: what we perceive is a result of the relationship between what we have evolved to be and what we have evolved within. What I question is where does track bear track come into it? Where does this cultural imagination – the various cultures’ certainty of correct and obvious interpretation of what is seen – obtain? I suppose it must be in the “processing” that imagination has its abode.

All this has led me to question imagination. What is it? I mean there are the Romantics who are sure they know, and Stevens (and other poets/artists of course) has things to say about its relationship to reality and to the mind, as do the Philosophers and Cognitive Scientists. So that’s what I’m exploring.

For me, all of it is still tethered to the idea of “thing”/”thing-in-itself” and in my head “thing”/”thing-in-itself” and “imagination” relate, but how? No idea yet. Just a feeling. It’s a bit like a Tarot card I’m not quite sure where to place relative to others already chosen, and if you read symbols of any sort, you know that position is critical. A new card can seriously derange what one thought was (finally) understood.

Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings

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

On the whole I really like poetry, but there are few poems that stick with me, that list in side my head, adding gravity by their attachment to a single spot inside my skull, just above my right ear. There are even fewer poems that become seeds that sprout (usually slowly and always painfully) in the cranial recesses.  Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” is one (it’s putting out another leaf right now and it is most uncomfortable).

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 —

I’ve been reading a compilation called The Dragonfly (named after her most famous poem). There are bits that rocket straight out of the known universe

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.

I thought I’d do a few writing exercises. I wrote these two little poetry seeds

   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.

Amelia Rosselli is new to me. She was an Italian poet who, being fundamentally tri-lingual, seems to have had an approach to language that had more to do with the spaces between words – the zip-zaps of those inter-lingual synapses – than most can manage. It makes her an evocative and interesting poet. Her inter-lingual power, I suspect, one of the reasons her stanzas feel as if they are starting mid story. Reading through the text, it is like a repeated sky-dive into the fray. It’s wonderful.

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

If you remember, the idea is that phenomenology is using the language in ways that confuse some (most?) readers and, hence, contribute to the accusations of meaninglessness. I want to see if, by approaching words individually, I can come to understand what Gadamer and his compatriots experience when reading poetry.

Here again is the sentence from part 1 of this post:

Imagine things freeing themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.

(Gadamer on Celan Introduction by Gerald L. Bruns)

One important word in the sentence is “thing.”

Dictionary.com defines “thing.”

thing

–noun

1.

a material object without life or consciousness; an inanimateobject.

2.

some entity, object, or creature that is not or cannot bespecifically designated or precisely described: The stick had abrass thing on it.

3.

anything that is or may become an object of thought: thingsof the spirit.

4.

things, matters; affairs: Things are going well now.

5.

a fact, circumstance, or state of affairs: It is a curious thing.

6.

an action, deed, event, or performance: to do great things;His death was a horrible thing.

7.

a particular, respect, or detail: perfect in all things.

8.

aim; objective: The thing is to reach this line with the ball.

10.

things,

a.

implements, utensils, or other articles for service: I’llwash the breakfast things.

b.

personal possessions or belongings: Pack your things andgo!

12.

a living being or creature: His baby’s a cute little thing.

I’ve cut some aspects of the definition out but this is enough to see two basic attributes of the word “thing.” The first is that it is a complicated word with many shades of meaning. The second is that even when “thing” refers to a life-form (item 12), it nevertheless refers to an object, in this case the baby. “Thing” in English refers very much to the objective world. Definitions 1 through 3 are the most common ways in which we understand something referred to as a “thing.”

The intensity of “thing”‘s meaning baggage is evident when we discuss animals we love. Technically a beloved pet is a thing. To be correct in English I would say “It ate its dinner already.” I don’t of course. I say “She already ate.” Calling someone an “it” is dehumanizing and quite insulting. That’s one reason I usually refer to the divine mythological “father” as “it” and not as “he.” “Are you telling me it killed all life on earth ’cause it was upset at the morals it gave us? Radical, dude.” Insulting, even without the obvious sarcasm. Using “it” for a life form impels disdain into the sentence. It implies an existence as an object as opposed to an existence as a subject.

Yet when Bruns speaks about “thing” in his introduction to Gadamer on Celan this isn’t what he means at all.

The following are from pages 20, 23 and 24 of Gadamer on Celan.

Something is thing-like if it is outside the alternatives of subject and object.

A thing is “set apart, elsewhere, outside not what we have made our own but that which is self-standing and alone…”

Things are strange when they are no longer “subject to our concepts and categories, when they escape us.”

The conceptual device that is subject/object gives meaning to “thing” in its normal use, and it is what Bruns and other phenomenologists are trying to get out from behind. “Things” are radically not-human in the sense that they are outside the  limits our language/concepts place on the world. That is, there is an apple that is the concept of “apple” pointing to the world object that tastes lovely with a bit of cheese and then there is the world thing which fundamentally is not captured by the word “apple.” This world-thing is what is outside the world as seen through the lens of the subject/object conceptual framework. Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

So what is outside the concept of subject/object and can we understand it?

The best I can do at the moment is provide what I think is an example of such “outsideness” in action. Most people have had the experience of staring at a word they have used for most of their lives and then suddenly the word is alien, strange. Watermelon, for example. Normally it is only a signifier of that heavy, sweet, green skinned fruit synonymous with summer. The word is transparent or instrumental to what it signifies. The word in itself disappears into the world of what it points to. But sometimes there is that odd thing that happens and suddenly, the word fractures. W A T E R M – E L O Π bursts apart and the letters, the shapes, the history if its existence comes to the forefront and what it signifies has to share the stage with its carrier. Odd feelings are triggered when this happens. Meaning surfaces, but not linguistic meaning. That is, older, pre-linguistic sources of meaning close in on awareness. This kind of “meaning” moves in us like whales just below the surface of the ocean’s skin.

Poetry makes a habit of trying to make this feeling happen. It tries to make language visible again, tries to trigger these bodily, non-conceptual sources of meaning. So one of the things I am being asked to do when reading Gadamer, Celan or Bruns is to feel for the world-object, but further, I am being asked to see words as “things” themselves. Personally I find the first request much simpler than the second. The implication of the words as “things” in Bruns’ sense is that they have an existence in the world apart from humanity. Perhaps as memes exist? Not sure yet.

Here is a sentence:

Imagine things freeing themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.

This is from a book called Gadamer and Celan “Who Am I and Who Are You?” and Other Essays. Page 20 if you want to look it up.

Does it make sense?

It’s no good that howl of incomprehension. It bears little weight especially if the ‘plaint is something that comes from the singular,”it means nothing to me therefore it has no meaning.”

More sturdy is the hundred-voice howl. L’élégance du hérisson: what? The mulitudes complaining about  the incomprehensibility of this sequence of letters bears some scrutiny. But if the examination shows that the complainers are all non French speakers then a different kind of examination is required. It’s not that “l’élégance du hérisson” is meaningless, it’s that it is meaningless in this situation. What needs to be studied is not the letter combination and its claim to meaning but, amongst other things, the limitations of the assessors’ assumptions about the nature of meaning.

Still, the fact that most howlers against phenomenology appear to be kin to our non-French judges does not mean phenomenology is in fact sensible in any way other than the one in which Rorschach blots are sensible.

So does the sentence I started with mean anything? Of course it must since the author who wrote it is no dummy, and if nothing else, it means something to M. Bruns. Yet, so what. If it doesn’t mean anything to you (and it didn’t to me either) then what to do about it? Here’s the thing: it might be more profitable to assume that Bruns is speaking a language you only think you recognize. The only other option is to close the book, but then communication cannot occur and I prefer understanding, even if it comes at the cost of learning a new “language” – something at which I do not excel.

I think the key to understanding Phenomenology in some way that goes beyond the individual psychology and cultural orientation of its practitioners is learning to re-encode the words we think we understand. For example, what does “thing” actually mean to Brun? That sort of re-engagement is what I propose to attempt on my own behalf.

The question about whether Phenomenology has a “language” of its own is something I want to answer because the poet in me is attracted to sentences like “Imagine things freeing themselves.” Yet I am sceptical. I mean, really, things “freeing” themselves? How can one understand that in a way that doesn’t provide “mind” to “things” and thereby cast the universe in the image-shadow of all that is human?

So, more on this in these pages as time goes by. I am on a quest.