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.

from Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

After a lustre of the moon, we say
We have not the need of any paradise,
We have not the need of any seducing hymn.

Festival rice

sown late the seedlings
finally sprout and yet the
planting of this year
will not be fruitless for the
earth of the fields is faithful

I am at work in the silence of an empty office. I have just been promoted and since the woman I am replacing goes on maternity leave Wednesday (pregnancy has proved difficult for her this time), I have come into the office on a holiday to clean up some files I know I won’t have time for next week. So I am listening to music and working.

The empty office is lovely. Empty like this it feels as if the space is a doorway to some other place, some green wisdom that seeps in through the windows but with all the people who are normally here, its gentle fragrance is lost in the musk of bodies in motion.

It’s rainy today. I can see the water trails on the windows but can’t hear the water as it hits. The music and the thickness of the glass: I am insulated by the hush. Resphighi is playing now and between the silence, the rain and the music, it is enough to evoke “Sunday Morning.”

I think a lot about what Stevens was trying to say with his poetry, “Sunday Morning” in particular. There is the thing about the death of the gods, the end of the god paradigm as the West has come to know it. There is the question of what to replace it with, whether the sensuality of the world is enough, or whether like his muse he must seek after certainties. Harold Bloom argues that Stevens cannot persuade himself to a resolution of what Bloom calls dialectical alternation between Fate and Power. It is as if he sees in Stevens a riven psyche, a Janus face that is turned to the idea that the gods twist our lives for us, and another face that is turned outward to a world in which we are alienated by an immense freedom, unable to be helped because there is no one there to see to us.

It may be. I cannot say what was in Stevens mind but I can say that I have never reacted to “Sunday Morning’s” stanzaic dialog in this way. I don’t see the downward movement of the pigeon’s wings as an image of our end. I have never reacted to the death of the sun, to dark, in this way. And why a pigeon and not a hawk or some other more lordly bird?

The eighth and last stanza reads:

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Maybe Bloom is reacting to the idea of “isolation” in a negative way. Maybe I just don’t get the existential fear of being godless, but I have always thought that the isolation of the sky is linked to the island solitude, and therefore an icon of freedom. Apparently, the wide water that separates the godly minded from that which Stevens calls unsponsored freedom is as inevitable as the disagreement between those whose paradigm of choice is based on the world of evidence and those whose world is based the narrative of faith.

But it is the things of the world that both begin and end the poem. Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, and the green freedom of a cockatoo: Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness. Those berries, and following, the casual flock of pigeons: they are us I think – pigeons as a trope for humanity. It is the ambiguousness of their flight within the horizon of freedom that makes them such a perfect image. Their flight, curvilinear paths inside the hoop of the world, this is not a Janus face but more a penopticon set in the mobile head of a million birds strung out across the world.

Pigeons are such mundane birds, apparently directionless, with no swift wing or piercing eye. Yet they know how to live in freedom. As the sun sets, they extend their wings and sink to their nightly rest. This is the thing I think Bloom missed. At night pigeons rest. They gather together, allow their voices to murmur quietly for a while and roost. They know that the freedom of the sky is best sought by them during the light. It is not a sinking into death, but a graceful extension of life into sleep, where the day can be reborn and where the darkness can be honoured for what it is.

I’m done now, with work. It’s past dinner time and I have suddenly realized how hungry I am. The chai latté I brought with me has long since gone. I turn off my computer and monitors, get up and turn off the printer and the lights and then return to my desk to sit for a few minutes watching the rain runnel down the window glass. I have another day off tomorrow. I wonder if the sun will return.