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.