Notes on "Notes"

Notes on Notes

(Pt.1)

Cameron Meek

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

To Henry Church

And for what, except for you, do I love?

Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man

Close to me, hidden in me day and night?

Equal in living changingness to the light

In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,

For a moment in the central of our being,

The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.

Presently, humanity seems to have been and be caught up this constant act of dichotomizing. Another word, to be more Stevensian, might be “negation”. As understood in a “dictionary” sense, negation functions as “the action or logical operation of negating or making negative.” (Merriam-Webster) However, the Stevensian notion of “negation” is quite different, or at the very least more complex. In Negation, Stevens writes:

Hi! The creator too is blind,

Struggling toward his harmonious whole,

Rejecting intermediate parts,

Horrors and falsities and wrongs;

Incapable master of all force,

Too vague idealist, overwhelmed

By an afflatus that persists.

For this then, we endure brief lives,

The evanescent symmetries

From that meticulous potter’s thumb.

To offer a very simple analysis of this, Stevens appears first to be turning our eyes upon the creator, alluding to a divine knowledge, “an afflatus”. It will be easy from a cursory reading of this text to assume that the “afflatus” references something of God, though I hope to convince you of the contrary. This creator, presumably God or a god, is blind. He does not see all, “Rejecting intermediate parts, / Horrors, falsities and wrongs”, because when God created he looked upon everything and “saw that it was good”. While Stevens’ seeming dislike for God must occupy another time and study, as “we endure brief lives” we seem to be in the act of negating. On a somewhat “material” level, though the act transcends mere physicality, we recognize the act of negating God as “sin”. A proper theology of sin, though, sees it not simply an act, but a nature. Here is where we find that the ability to partake in the act of negating God actually persists within that “afflatus”, what George Santayana elucidates in Three Philosophical Poets:

“It is that all we observe about us, and ourselves also, may be so many passing forms of a permanent substance. This substance, while remaining the same in quantity and in inward quality, is constantly redistributed; in its redistribution it forms those aggregates which we call things, and which we find constantly disappearing and reappearing. All things are dust, and to dust they return; a dust, however, eternally fertile, and destined to fall perpetually into new, and doubtless beautiful, forms. This notion of substance lends a much greater unity to the outspread world; it persuades us that all things pass into one another, and have a common ground from which they spring successively, and to which they return.”

I will not and cannot argue that this “substance” is solely the sinful nature, for there is good in it too, but we may safely conclude that sinful nature is, indeed, a part/piece of that substance. The afflatus is a kind of divine “thing” that is carried forward through time, persisting in the “human spirit”. Negation, then, is inherently and naturally a human “thing”. Transcendentalist philosophy reveals to us the idea that we live in a world of shadows; the things we see are not the things themselves, but the closest possible representation of what is real. Because of this, we see that all things in this world are somehow imperfect. That being the case, if we are to set up this world as very adversarial, we contrast two imperfections. This is not to say that truths do not exist within the world (don’t steal, don’t murder, etc.), but that in regards to certain topics we must centralize.

A good example of this is the debate between architects and engineers of form and function. If there were no functionality to things, but only artistic value, the world would be difficult to operate in. However, there is a certain pleasure given by aesthetics. As modernity has shown us, putting people in boxes within boxes seems to have an effect of eroding and weakening the human spirit. The arts occupy a large part of every person’s life, whether it be film, literature, music, or “art”, and humanity places great value upon these things. What then is the solution, for it seems that form over function or function over form fall short. The answer, of course, is that we must exist, as we do, in a kind of tension between the two.

This is how we must understand negation in Stevens. Not merely an act of opposing a singular force, it is to exist within the tension of two forces. For as we enter into this first part of Notes, It Must be Abstract, Stevens will gaze upon two forces and seek to center us within that tension. In The Primacy of Negation, Dustin Dallman concludes with these words:

“Negation does not consist in the pale cynicism of the naive realist, nor the puerile dismissal of the contrarion, but in the rigor and ardor of the artist and the materialist. And it is negation, not affirmation, that resides at the very center of Stevens' poetics.”

“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction  Life”

Before entering Notes, Stevens offers a kind of forward or preface, as I revise this, it may be best understood as a kind of thesis, dedicated to the elusive “Henry Church”.  I say elusive, for I found it rather difficult to learn much about the man. What I have discovered I will share: Church was born in 1836 and died in 1908, receiving “posthumous reputation as an American primitive for his avocation of painting and sculpting.” He was a blacksmith by trade, but expressed interest in art, most famous for “carving bas relief figures in Squaw Rock on the bank of the Chagrin River.” (Lipman #) In The Poems of Our Climate, Harold Bloom writes, “The eight lines that stand at the start of Notes toward a Supreme Fiction are no more addressed to the muse or interior paramour than they are to Henry Church.” (Bloom 167) Why, then, name Henry Church? Despite the lack of biography present, we can ascertain some importance from what little we find. Key in that biography are the terms, whether intentional or not, “American primitive” and “art”. In the first part of Notes, Stevens is involved with a reduction, obviated by the seeming obsession with or pressing towards the “first idea”. Stevens makes it quite clear that the ephebe must be, obviously, a youth, but also a youth untainted by an knowledge or understanding of the parts of the world. This, then, gets us to Church. Church, as an “American primitive”, embodies this idea of someone fresh and unscathed by understanding; he is free to see and experience anew. As an artist, he is a creator, someone or something from which ideas originate. The first idea, no doubt, references numerous things, yet the first consciousness originates with words, for they are a tangible, explained manifestation of not simply consciousness, but shared consciousness. Two notions of this: “In the beginning was the Word”, John 1. And in Genesis 1 we read, “In the beginning, God created […] And God said…”

Here we encounter the afflatus, for this divine knowledge that lives and persists in all things must originate somewhere. It does, and that is with God.

            As you see, we have exacerbated a great amount of time and effort upon understanding Church, but with good cause. So we then enter into the prologue or prelude, reading,

And for what, except for you, do I love?

Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man

Close to me, hidden in me day and night?

This “you” is not simply Henry Church, and as we concluded earlier, it may just as easily be the muse, specifically Mnemosyne the mother of the muses for she could be associated not just as a mother figure, but the mother figure. This accounts for the place of the feminine within the “supreme” fiction, as provider of life, love, but also a kind of starting point or origin. This makes sense because the ephebe, while referring to a youth, most often specifies it as male. And here we have that first instance of two things, Adam and Eve, ephebe and Mnemosyne, not negating, but held in tension together, alongside one another.

The “you” also could be the reader. Oversimplified, yes, but equally likely to any other guess. If this is the case, the notes are not merely towards a “supreme fiction”, though a supreme fiction, as we should discover, transcends the apparent barrier of reality, but a supreme life. For as Jesus or Galatians may read, all commandments are summed up in the one: Love your neighbor as yourself. On this, Bloom writes, “The ‘you’ here must be a synecdoche which includes all familial passions yet transcends them. Transcendence, indeed, seems to me the tenor of this octave, culminating as it does in ‘the central’, ‘the vivid transparence’, and ‘peace.’” (Bloom 167) As a synecdoche, the “you” refers to a part of the whole, which makes sense as Stevens writes this as “his truly central humming, where a more capable idea of the hero appears as ‘the major man’”, though of course he begins his journey/quest to heroics as an ephebe. (Bloom 166) And as a synecdoche, this is the central piece of Stevens’ work; it is that negation, the part which exists within the tension of two, not necessarily opposing parts, but of two parts dealing with that interplay between fiction and reality. The supreme fiction will encompass a portion of reality, and the supreme life will accomplish feats that seem impossible, fictitious.    

Because it, this “supreme” thing, sits in a negation of reality and fiction and as the central part of the whole of Stevens’ work, it transcends, becomes “the tenor of this octave”. We then must move to deal with those parts of transcendence that give this piece centrality, as well as those parts of centrality that make this piece transcendent.

            Before taking that step though, let us deal with “the extremest book of the wisest man/ Close to me, hidden in me day and night?” In the beginning, God says, “Let there be light. God saw that the light was good, so he separated that day from the night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.” This may be a slight paraphrase, but it introduces us to this idea of light as something which makes clear, as well as visible. Light is both physically visible and invisible. It is real and “fictitious”. And it is for you, for Henry Church, for the muse that Stevens holds this book within himself in times of light and darkness. What is this extremest book of the wisest man? It may be the Bible, of course, but it may also be whatever “you” understands or comes to understand as the supreme fiction. In many ways, the Bible is the story, or series of stories, from which all other stories come. Does this make it the supreme fiction? If you were to ask an archaeologist, they would tell you it is partially fictitious and partially real; regardless, we must not stray from the significance of the presence of this text within light and darkness. The supreme fiction is “hidden in me day and night”. Again, we encounter this seemingly divine spirit or knowledge that is hidden within a person. They know not how it came about or surfaced within them, but it was there as both light and the absence of light, day and night, light and dark. The first idea is always the word, but the next idea is light. The light comes forth from the word, the first idea, and Stevens’ reduction to this first idea is essential as the starting point of Notes.

 Earlier I made mention of form v. function, and this example was not without intention. On Stevens’ reduction, Bloom writes, “It is then a socially induced dissatisfaction that sends Stevens back to an ultimate reduction”. (Bloom 179) Stevens is upset at his surroundings, “at being surrounded by apartment-dwellers.” The reaction to an excess of function was a desire to get outside of that, to return to nature. This might be easily accomplished with a walk in the woods, as seemed to satisfy Frost, Whitman, and others. But Stevens dissatisfaction, his ennui, occurs more in a “centering on ‘desire’ or the pathos of the poet’s will discovering that to live with the first idea alone is to have ‘what is not.’” (Bloom 179) In other words, he is not merely satisfied to return to nature, but must reach for the source of nature. If you remember the scriptures, we find that the before light, “darkness was over the surface of the deep.” Darkness is what is not. People describe it as the absence of light. Here then we are moving closer to the reason for this reduction; it seems that these “things”, if they can be called that, have eluded us. We have sought to rationalize things and make sense of them without knowing that first idea. “The word”, language, is how we come about understanding things; through the word comes light, or understanding and the ability to see which, in turn allows us to organize things, domesticate them, into parts of a sensible whole. David Spurr has written at great length on the subject of “the gaze” and how by looking at things and people and places, we begin to colonize and order them. But we must not forget that the physical is merely one part, on end. To exist in the center, the negation, is to move towards those things which are not. Because, as we know, the true composition of reality is as much material as it is immaterial. Having established the reason for Stevens’ reduction, then, we move to those transcendental ideas that he introduces us to in this preface.

In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,

Equal in living changingness to the light

In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,

For a moment in the central of our being,

The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.

Here we actually find the word “light”, in the context of a single, certain truth where Stevens encounters the proverbial “you”. What is hidden in darkness, that which is not, becomes visible in the light. It is a paradox as well as a trope, showing us that to even acknowledge “what is not” is to acknowledge existence. That something is sublime and transcendent, and Bloom has revealed what those transcendent and sublime “things” that allow us to take the primary steps in Notes manifest as.  We have “the central”, “the vivid transparence”, and “peace”. I feel as though centrality receives sufficient attention and explanation. Transparence should be easy enough, for it operates with light. To be transparent is to be visibly or physically seen through, usually as a result of light passing through an object. However, to be transparent is also to be open about who you are and what you think and believe. The transparence that we bring somehow “is peace.” How is this so? It is because “you”, as we have established, is the primitive artist: the first creator, the muse of the oral tradition, the innocent ephebe. “You” are untainted or, as we enter into It Must be Abstract, must re-become untainted and “see the sun again with an ignorant eye”. It must be seeing the light with recognition that light is not the only significant part of the whole.

So we conclude: peace is a result of an untainted being experiencing a recognition, or a re-cognition, of light and dark, reality and fiction, the word and the silence. The primitive artist naturally exists in negation, the tension of the real and fictitious, and he is the freed man because he has acknowledged that he is merely man, part of a whole that persists in the sublime, the divine knowledge or force that persists in all things despite the fact that, to those dwelling in apartments, trapped within the confines of the modern and overly rational and fixated world, “that which is not” is nothing but an irrational fancy, it is the first idea and therefore the source of all things. Even more than that, it is the supreme fiction.