Both of these prompts struck me as provocative topics to concentrate on for the task of interpreting the texts we have so far encountered this semester in Poetry and Pragmatism. I felt fairly certain that I would be able to locate an example of the “experience effect” in the works of the Pragmatists as the primary thrust of their work is dedicated to investigating the “practical bearings” ideas have for us in the world of our everyday lived experience. The “seduction effect” on the other hand is a device that these scientifically-minded philosophers never seemed to think expedient in their invectives against rationalism. It is often pointed out that America is a country that was founded by chaste fore-fathers of the Puritan grain. No doubt, at the turn of the 20th century not a little of this attitude still lingered in public sentiment. It is perhaps not unusual then that we do not find Professor William James lecturing to Harvard audiences about subject matters we might expect to encounter on opening the notebooks of Freud—not taking into account the diametrically opposed turn of mind these psychologists represent. Oddly enough, James would find it advantageous to make use of one of Freud’s discovery—the Unconscious—but to decidedly ends that Freud never would have imagined or approved.
Yes, furnishing an example of the “seduction effect” would prove more difficult, but I could at least be certain that if ever I was to find it, it would be occurring simultaneously with the “experience effect,” seeing how the work of the Pragmatists exerted such a prominent influence on the work of American philosophers and poets that came after them. A good place to start seemed like the poetry of Wallace Stevens, whose poems from Harmonium have been described by Hayden Carruth as being, “exotic as their titles; full of tropical imagery and unusual diction, armored in brilliant stylized rhetoric.” I found that as I worked my way further through the collection, again and again I kept coming across instances when the speaker “yields himself” to moments of sensual release—to the sheer radiance and beauty of the environment he inhabits. This all makes perfect sense. For one of the criticisms Stevens makes against modern literary society in his book of poetic theory, The Necessary Angel, is that “We cannot yield ourselves. We are not free to yield ourselves” (4). Need I say we are not free to be seduced? I take this to mean that we are overly preoccupied, indeed, we are too conscious of ourselves to ever allow the possibility of an external experience move us to transcendence. We have become obsessed with apprehending meaning, or as Stevens writes: “We have been a little insane about the truth” (33). Seduction necessitates that we relinquish control over ourselves and completely yield to the allure of the tempter which in Stevens’s poems assumes the guise of art and nature. William Barrett has pointed out that we have set ourselves over against nature in the attempt to master it; he cites this as the most fundamental example of our epoch’s metaphysic: the Nietzschean “Will to Power.” What is lost in such a dynamic and technical relationship with nature are the primal bonds of mystery, beauty, harvest and fertility that nourished the human race for tens of thousands of years. Please, do not mistake this for a plea of Romantic nostalgia harking back to pre-industrial society—the challenges and afflictions of such an existence we Post-Industrial New Scientists can never comprehend in their gravity. Modern Science and Technology are indispensable aspects for regulating our society and attending to its citizen’s wants and needs. In spite of all this, I don’t think it impossible for us seek to revitalize those parts of our being that are neglected when we assume rationalism as our modus-operandi. For this we must look to the wisdom of past ages that perfected the science of the spirit, as surely, if they could, they would look to us for the some instruction on the spirit of science. Who among us can open ourselves to the bounty of the “Timeless mother” in Stevens’s poem “In the Carolinas” to say with the speaker: “The pine-tree sweetens my body/ The white iris beautifies me.”
According to Stevens then, we must let ourselves be seduced back into experience, being too abstract to even “dip” back into reality by way of our own volition as William James had proposed. The poem in Harmonium I feel is most intriguing as a seducer is entitled “Infanta Marina”:
Her terrace was the sand
And the palms and the twilight.
She made of the motions of her wrist
The grandiose gestures
Of her thought.
The rumpling of the plumes
Of this creature of the evening
Came to be the sleights of sails
Over the sea.
And thus she roamed
In the roamings of her fan,
Parting of the sea,
And of the evening,
As they flowed around
And uttered their subsiding sound.
In this poem the carriage of nature appears in the personified form of a daughter born of either the King of Spain or Portugal fitted out with all the baroque elegancies of a spoiled heir to one of the most dominant world empires of the 16th century. This evening the Princess ventures out from her usual after-dinner affairs in the court to enjoy the exotic scenery of the New World. The reader is like a peasant who has stumbled upon this rare encounter with regal beauty and carefully notes every one of her movements so that he may play the images over and over again in his mind once she has departed. As we follow the Princess we observe how she makes nature attend to her like royal courtiers. The palms of the second line bend to shield her fair eyes from the too bright crepuscular glow that reflects off the gentle ocean. She dismisses with the flick of her wrist any ominous clouds that threaten to squander the beauty of this twilight moment— just as she would dismiss a band of players that failed to amuse her. The rumpled appurtenances of her evening gown roll like the wind through the massive sails of caravels navigating the limitless oceans in her honor, the grace with which she saunters act as “sleights” or models of dexterity studied by the captain and his men throughout the voyage. All nature is in harmony with the waving rhythms of her fan as she tames the surf and prolongs the ecstasy of the day’s final light before it plummets to the bottom of the sea and the darkness of the empty universe descends upon all.
Stevens’s succeeds in seducing his reader into “yielding” to the irresistible majesty of nature by narrating the scene with all the delicacy proper to an artist painting a portrait of a noble subject that would hang in the Royal Gallery. He has put the reader in a position of humble awe where, overwhelmed, he will hardly recognize his former self that previously reckoned nature in terms of its potential yield. It is his hope, and mine as well, that the gain derived from being in the presence of such greatness will cause him to forget his habitual ulterior motives that he may again be as, “the new-born children interpreting love/In the voices of Mothers.” The Timeless Mother that is…
No comments:
Post a Comment