I cannot escape...I am a man carrying thing (pt. 1)

I bought some gum the other day. It was called "Swerve". I have a friend named Tyler who was nicknamed "Swerve" freshman year. I downloaded a Cat Stevens song the other day, Peace Train, and the album title is "Teaser and the Firecat". I was listening to Pandora the other day and a song with harmonium in the title was playing. I cannot escape Wallace Stevens. He was following me before I even knew it. How could this be?

The first place I thought to look was the Earthy Anecdote. It is the first poem in harmonium, and therefore a great starting point. There is certainly more to the poem than I am putting down, but for the sake of my discussion, we see this: the bucks cannot escape the firecat. They swerve every which way, but eventually they are consumed. Can we escape Wallace Stevens? Of course not! We have become consumed (or will be). What does this have to do with Cat Stevens' song Peace Train? At the end of the poem Earthy Anecdote, the firecat sleeps. The firecat is at peace. I imagine that poetry, as every poem is about poetry, will not rest until it has consumed us. But when that happens, we will be at peace.


The Swerve's part in this seems fairly simple. We are constantly moving, composed of particles that are in constant motion. The firecat, poetry, does something that makes us shift, swerve. It ignites something, hence the fire, and I would call that something life. But it is only when we are consumed that we fully spring to life. If you remember the words of Christ to Nicodemus, "You must die and be born again."


Now, to bring in Man Carrying Thing, we must slowly make our way through the poem. The reason I find this poem of the utmost significance is that it is my assigned poem for memorization. It leads off saying:


The poem must resist the intelligence

Almost successfully.


If we look back to Dustin's blog, we read this:


The point at which Stevens' implicit philosophy does not cohere with transcendental realism is that which most likely motivated Critchley to eschew any commonality between the two positions in the first place. As a transcendental realist, I hold that the physical sciences stand in a privileged relation to that intelligible nothing which is the thing-in-itself. By contrast to the attitude most commonly taken up in the humanities, I am not at all bothered by the notion that the average scientist understands crude reality far better than I ever will. And in fact, I believe that, insomuch as the artist must first negate the spontaneous "reality" of the song in order to revise it into new poetic constellations, art depends absolutely on the negative force of science.


In my opinion, it is as though Dustin has taken those first two lines of poetry, and given us the back story. Furthermore:


Illustration:


A brune figure in winter evening resists

Identity.

I did not understand the word "brune" at first, so I made my way to the dictionary. It did not initially show up until I did some further looking. From what I can gather, brune as a verb is "to brown". As an adjective, I believe it to simply describe a dark figure. While our first thought might be that this is a black man, identifying the brune figure as a shadow seems a greater appropriation, seeing as the man resists identity. And what of the "winter evening"? The first thing we should all think of upon hearing of winter is, of course, The Snow Man. But we must wait to consider those implications.

The thing he carries resists 

The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then.

As secondary (parts not quite perceived

Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles

Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt,

Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow

Out of a storm we must endure all night,

Out of a storm of secondary things),

A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.

As we should know at this point, the crude sciences, the "primary" operate from a stance of what they call "truth". We have scientific laws. The law of gravity, the second law of thermodynamics, etc. These are the primary things. The secondary, then, is of a different nature. We first see "parts not quite perceived of the obvious whole, uncertain particles of the certain solid". Particles elucidates atoms elucidating a swerve, and they are part of a "certain solid", a body of some kind. The predominant figure in this illustration magnifies that which is small, secondary, seen as subservient to the primary. However, this secondary is that which composes all, the solid thing, in other words, the truth. It becomes quite apparent that the primary relies upon the secondary in some regard, though it would be unfair to describe this as a parasitic relationship when it is, in fact, a mutual bond (no pun intended). Again Stevens points to snow in a kind of chaotic storm, which again takes us to The Snow Man, but again we resist the urge to go there just yet. And we, we the bucks, must "endure all night" the ferocious storm of secondary things set upon us. You see, we are rational beings, we are primary. We seek truth, and we pursue understanding. Much like the deer, though, we cannot escape the firecat. Much like a primary thing, we bear some uncertain yet unmistakable link to the secondary thing. And the horror, "the horror!", is that these secondary things, much like a Picaso painting of Gertrude Stein, "suddenly are real."

There are a lot of ideas at work in this moment, but the conclusion is really quite simple:

We must endure our thoughts all night, until

The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

At last we may confront the Snow Man. But first we should recap. The fire cat is poetry, consuming the deer. The snowstorm is poetry, and it consumes us. But if you notice, we carry that poetry with us, for we are all a man (or woman) carrying thing. Because that thing is always just a thing, and it is always resisting the "necessitous sense", the needful thing, and that is because it is never quite the real thing. And only when we become aware that the primary is actually subliminal when set against the secondary, the poem and poetry, do we see "The bright obvious" standing "motionless in cold." That bright obvious is, of course, the snow man. Here is what I had to say about the snow man in an earlier post: 

The poem is about a cold man. His "mind of winter", he cares not for what emotions the snowfall in the forest might arouse. He thinks neither romantic thoughts, nor thoughts of "misery". He thinks of but one thing: truth. Further and further he goes into the barren wasteland. He is not searching for anything, simply going from one place to another, as a ship sailing from one coast to another. Eventually, after long travel and toil, he comes to a place where he is surrounded by nothing but a barren, white, wasteland. The snow swirls around, and he can barely see. The wind blows, whistling in his ears like a train setting out on some journey. And in this moment, the man becomes vaguely aware of something. As he looks, and as he listens, and as he watches the snow swirl, and the snow fall, and sees nothing but white, he finds himself lost in the nothingness, and thinks himself nothing. And he is aware that nothing is in this place; no reason, no truth, no fact. But, then, from this nothingness, something stirs in him. It stirs. What stirs? He knows, he reasons, and he thinks. But this...this...feeling, it suddenly becomes everything for him. He does not care what he knows, he wants this. It was once nothing to him. But now, now...it is everything.

And Dustin writes:

The frostiness of the boughs, the roughness of the spruces, the bareness of place are all comprehensible only insomuch as these qualities are possessed already by the observer. Making this claim, Stevens performs a sly transposition of registers: the Snow Man is rough, icy, and cold not in his physical constitution--for as the final stanza explains, he too is nothing--but rather possesses these qualities as concepts. The fabrication of reality is mediated by such concepts, and the makeup of our commonplace experiences, prior to the interventions of poetry, consists in the labor of imagination.

[...]

This synthesis is the result of the antagonism between imagination and the real. As explained above, such a procedure results always in some remainder: imagination remains as the negation of reality, the nothing in excess of the something. Negation thus figures as the condition of possibility for all poetry. The nothing that is, understood in the dialectical sense, is precisely the negation of the something that is, its negative inverse.

I would argue that the "nothing that is everything", "the negation of something that is", is poetry itself. And this poetry is negating the man who is nothing, opposing his desires for the primary and resistance to, though always somehow being controlled by it, the subliminal. 

The point seems to be this: we cannot escape poetry because it is not only pursuing us, but somehow a part of us, within us, made manifest somehow in the "thing", whatever that may be, that each of us carries. Because that thing is not the real thing, but instead a shadow of a greater reality. And what is this greater reality, where and when and how and by who is it made manifest? For now, I believe that transcendental piece to be none other than the Lucretian sublime, that thing which is behind everything. 

This is what I had written for my ending:

And this is where I will end for now because I must think and I must be consumed and I must try, because of some futile human instinct, to escape once more for the sake of knowing, if in fact, it is truly impossible. How much farther I have to go...

But then I realized something...

It is snowing outside today. Today, of all days, when I am writing this post, when I am trying my best to draw and pull and bring everything back to the snow man. You see, I thought I would try to escape again to know for sure. But, as I finished writing those words, I clicked over to facebook and was overwhelmed by the amount of comments on the snow. I scrolled through my blog, and saw the small picture of some forlorn looking snow man. I thought of the very music I enjoy on a snowy day. And then, as my mind paced through those thoughts, I had an epiphany. I had not escaped, I could not. It was all around me and, try as I might to know and understand and exist in a state of primacy, I cannot. Because, you see,

We must endure our thoughts all night, until

The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

And for now, for this particular moment in time, this is what I have done.