Lighting The Mind; Minding The Light. A Little Spiritual Therapy

    Here’s a headline: I love to read. Reading, especially poetry, is cathartic for me (it’s been a tough summer), like chopping wood or jogging is cathartic for other people. I suppose I am also looking for wisdom here and there, as well. Then there are times when the spirit, or soul, or mind...or whatever you believe in...needs a little help. And for me…now would be a good time. So I reached up into my book shelves and pulled out some old favorites from the poetry shelf, as well as my Rembrandt King James Bible. I regularly read The Book Of Job, which I have commented on before in this space, and The Gospel of Mark, which I believe is the best and only gospel worth reading. The authors of both The Book of Job and Mark’s gospel, whoever they may be, teach us about dealing with the incommensurate, which, if nothing else, keeps me humble. They also tell us how to find out who we are. As for the poetry, I immediately went to, you guessed it, Wallace Stevens, specifically his anthology, Collected Poems. My first instinct was to turn to his famous “Sunday Morning” and “The Idea of Order at Key West.” But then I thought: “No, these are some of his early poems.” I wanted to focus on his late poems that I had not read in a while. So I flipped to the back of the book—and was again humbled and touched by what I rediscovered, as if seeing a former love even more beautiful,  years after the first kiss. 

    I focused on the final group of poems, collected under the title The Rock. (I say “collected” because, though Stevens intended The Rock to be a book, it was not published separately in his lifetime.) What I first noticed in The Rock was that two of Stevens’s other famous poems appear here: “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” (which I have printed before on this website) and “Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself.” So I began my reading with these. And for the first time in years, I began dissecting what I was reading. I know...I’m a dork. But feel free to read on. 

Light the first light of evening, as in a room

In which we rest and, for small reason, think

The world imagined is the ultimate good.

    That is the first stanza of “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.” Of course, I am struck by the doubled “light” in the first line. And struck, too, by the challenging third line: Its bold statement that “The world imagined is the ultimate good.” But then I notice what appear to be Stevens’ hedgings. We only “think” this, but is it true? Stevens himself seems doubtful, even scornfully so, when he adds, parenthetically, “for small reason.” But small reason isn’t the same as no reason, right? Maybe small reason is enough to justify thinking of “the world imagined as the ultimate good.”

    And what about the fourth stanza?

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.

We say God and the imagination are one… [the ellipsis is Stevens’]

How high that highest candle lights the dark.

    So, “we say” this: the speaker is hedging again. We “say” it, but is it true? And if true, is it only so “within its vital boundary, in the mind”? I notice, too, his focus on the “mind” and “imagination” in both these stanzas—as I recall that the mind’s imagining is a key locale throughout much of Stevens’s poetry. And then there’s that “candle”—a source of light. Which leads to the poem’s final lines:

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,

We make a dwelling in the evening air,

In which being there together is enough.

    So are light and the mind the same? That seems to be the implication. And we do commonly speak of illumination as understanding. But Stevens also implies a teasing question in that “central” mind: Is there a difference between this mind and the seemingly less spacious mind shared by the paramour and his silent interlocutor? And on a personal note, those final three lines may be the most beautiful and intimate lines in all of poetry…outside of William Shakespeare, of course. I mean, isn’t that the goal? And isn’t that the reason, or at least one of the reasons, we read deeply? To see those words at the end of a deep and beautiful poem…written by a master. “In which being there together is enough.” Priceless…

    Next I turn to “Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself” — famous for its play with whether things are “in” the “mind” or “outside.” And immediately I see that the speaker is hedging again: the “seemed” in “The “scrawny cry… / seemed like a sound in his mind.” Plus the poem’s closing words: “It was like / A new knowledge of reality.” Well, was it a “new knowledge” or not?

    Naturally, after all the “light” in “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” I take note here of the sun in the line “The sun was coming from outside.”

    As I now move on to other poems in The Rock, I’m on the lookout for various forms of light and of the mind/imagination. These are the final lines of “A Quiet Normal Life”:

There was no fury in transcendent forms.

But his actual candle blazed with artifice

    And in “The Planet on the Table,” we get an extraordinary identification of the creative self with the very source of the world’s light:

His self and the sun were one

And his poems, although makings of his self,

Were no less making of the sun.

    But in the poem “Lebensweisheitspielerei” (a made-up word, funny because ponderously Germanic, literally meaning “Fooling Around with the Wisdom of Life”), something very different happens. Instead of the sun’s power, we have its poverty:

Weaker and weaker, the sunlight falls

In the afternoon. The proud and the strong

Have departed.

Those that are left are the unaccomplished,

The finally human,

Natives of a dwindled sphere.

Their indigence is an indigence

That is an indigence of the light,

A stellar pallor that hangs on the threads.

Little by little, the poverty

Of autumnal space becomes

A look, a few words spoken.

    That thrice-repeated “indigence” underscores the immensity of loss envisioned here, whether it be the loss of a loved one, or even the loss one’s self. There is a sense of absence as well, in the poem “The Plain Sense of Things,” where again the scene is wintry:

After the leaves have fallen, we return

To a plain sense of things. It is as if

We had come to an end of the imagination…

    Knowing how key the imagination is to Stevens, I’m surprised by its “end.” But then imagination itself seems to come to the rescue, in a mind-boggling  statement: “Yet the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined.” And the poem ends with:

The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this

Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,

Required, as necessity requires.

    Is there a pond and are there lilies or not? Is there knowledge—or is it just imagined? I love how Stevens teases us here.

    As I reflect on these late poems from my favorite poet, I’ve got questions: “What do we know?” “How do we know it?” “What illuminates our minds?” “Or…are our minds their own illumination?” And people wonder I have trouble sleeping at night! The way Stevens plays with all of these questions is unmatched, and more engagingly unsettling, than that of any other poet I’m aware of. If you are still with me, dear reader, I invite you to take a leap of faith, as it were, and invite the former Hartford insurance executive turned poet, into your heart and mind. I promise you will not be disappointed. And may you, and the one who has your heart, make that dwelling in the evening air, in which just being there, together, is enough.