Thanks for that excellent resource for internet reading about Stevens. I read several reviews posted there of books on Stevens's poetry, one of which led me via several searches to a reference to another poet whom I hadn't heard of before, a Canadian named Christopher Dewdney, whose poetry and prose ranges even further and more deeply into consciousness and mind than Stevens's did. Here are some extracts from a paper concerning this poet/thinker:
“Are not "novel configurations," as linguistic formulations, always already marked by the duplicities and governmental prohibitions of all language? Must the poems always dismantle themselves in order to prevent any single, targetable centre of meaning from appearing, in order to escape the governmental regimentation of language? When Lecker traces the binary opposition of Parasite-Governor through various poems, he decreases their charge of multiple meaning, and encloses them within a conceptual box, which unwittingly maintains the efficient operation of the Governor.”
“…That the twin cortices of speech and interpretation insidiously distort reality tacitly implies that two realities exist: an internal one and an external one. Dewdney also insists that the act of articulation transforms the world through language. Similarly, the elaborate analogy between a parabolic antenna and the induction of information into the mind that Dewdney constructs in "Parasite Maintenance", suggests that sensory data passes through the language cortex before reaching the mind. According to this model, language mediates between mind and world: "Metaphorical objects & models are precipitated by synesthesia into mimics of the very adjuncts to reality out of which the human perception arranges itself" (p. 137). We do not know reality but adjuncts to it that are conditioned by perception, language, and its corollary, interpretation. The external world then is a perceptually, linguistically and hermeneutically determined reality when it appears to human consciousness. The mind, hinged to the external world, exists at a liminal interface with the world of objects, and interprets the world through language. In
Spring Trances,"the secret harmony of life unfolds in silence and without witness" (p. 59), but "there can be no highlights if there is no point of view" (p. 141) in
The Cenozoic Asylum.The presence of a human consciousness always involves a point of view. The world might exist without human presence, but the world exists for us only as we construe it. Dewdney assumes a phenomenological
via media between object and subject by delineating the interaction of perceptual consciousness with landscape, neither of which seems entirely autonomous.
Perhaps one should backtrack to
A Palaeozoic Geology of London,
Ontario in order to pursue some of the implications of the statements made in "Parasite Maintenance", and to "see" how some of those formulations devolve. The verb "to see" is used designedly here, for we use the verb of vision almost synonymously with the verb of comprehension, "to know". Although the empirical equation between seeing and understanding generally holds in
A Palaeozoic Geology,Dewdney increasingly tests the validity of equating the two, most noticeably in
Alter Sublime,just as he questions the tendency to correlate "sense" (one of the five senses), and "sense" (having meaning). Dewdney makes the ambiguity of the term explicit in "October" with a typographical joke: "I do not consider the waves empty/in your sense.(s)" (p. 115). The poem, "Glass", adumbrates an empirical stance, in which the senses attempt to make sense of the world:
GLASS
What is beneath benthos
is only hinted at.
Winter develops a pump in a forest clearing.
Each shadow is accounted for, the
fossil of a lady with
indefinite articles in her purse.
We cannot see around
the way through ourselves.
Every man finds his shaft
articulated, indefinite.
The mind is a cavity in which
sensitive plates, exposed to
unimaginable radiation
dance over blind flowers.
There is a cold hexagonal fire
in the insect's eye. (p. 27)
"Glass" is, I believe, a poem about the limits of object knowability as that knowledge is regulated by perception. What is beneath or beyond the surface perception of an object is only hinted at, because we apprehend only one surface, or visual horizon, at a time in our scanning of the world. The isolated position of "benthos" at the end of the first line reinforces the dichotomy of two dimensional surface perception, and the intuited three dimensionality of objects. Benthos, the flora and fauna that live at the bottom of the sea, hovers remotely beyond the reach of the eye. The spatial detachment of "benthos" from the line exaggerates the distance between percipient and the thing perceived. Benthos hints at its submarine presence, but because one cannot see it clearly, it is not readily understood. In this instance, seeing is believing. Similarly, the articles in the lady's purse insinuate their existence, but remain indefinite because they are not visually apprehended. "Each shadow is accounted for" by the objects that cast those shadows; however, a shadow, like a fossil, is a substanceless form. The image of a woman strikes the retina only as a two dimensional "fossil", as an image with a distinguishable shape, but not invested with the solidity of an object.
In "Fovea Centralis I", Dewdney uses a comparable metaphor, a tube, to define the two dimensional impression of visual data on consciousness: "Take the concept of linear time. Each three dimensional object projected along this linear axis would describe a kind of tube, its outline in some way exactly corresponding to the shape of the object" (p. 31). Fovea centralis — "that part of the retina with which we look at things. The point of attention on the retina itself' (p. 186) — witnesses the three dimensional object as a hollow shape, having form but no substance. Within "linear time", in the single act of observation, we see a two dimensional plane, possessing height and width. The image implies depth, but we do not see depth in the isolated moment of perception. The effect is photographic or filmic; one visually records the contours of the object, not the object in its three dimensional entirety. Our intuition of depth results from previous experience, by regarding the object from alternate perspectives, and summoning our memory of those alternative perspectives. The act of "recognition" is the act of knowing something again, of substantiating knowledge, of "re-cognizing". In Spring Trances, Dewdney claims that in linear time, only one image at a time strikes the eye: "Events occur linearly so densely they are viewed as simultaneous" (p. 60). In fact, vision articulates only one event or visual plane at a time to consciousness. In The Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that a "human gaze never posits more than one facet of the object, even though by means of horizons it is directed towards all others."23 That is, at one moment of time, we perceive only that plane which appears before us; we apprehend the object as "real" when "it is given as the infinite sum of an indefinite series of perspectival views in each of which the object is given but in none of which it is given exhaustively."24 It requires the presence of a synthesizing consciousness to assimilate these perspectives, and to confirm to itself the authenticity of the object. The lady in "Glass" is therefore both a fossil and a lady, a substanceless form when perceived synchronically, that is, in linear time, yet also an identifiable entity when perceived diachronically, through the lens of memory. One presumes there are articles in her purse, because memory, the repository of perceptual experience, dictates that there should be articles there. The articles remain indefinite, however, because they are not perceived. On the other hand, given Dewdney's sense of humour, one should perhaps not absolutely discount the possibility that "indefinite articles" also signifies a grammatical part of speech.
The subject-dependent enterprise of perception preoccupies Dewdney in "Glass", but he also asserts that the outside world does in fact exist. The precise division between subject and object may oscillate, but the position that Dewdney adopts is not a Berkeleian one, in which matter has existence only when it is reconstructed in the mind of the viewer. "We cannot see around/the way through ourselves", because the corporal self exists as a spatial object. The phrase juggles the cliché of "seeing through someone", which presumes a corporeal transparency, and a visibility of the mind and its intentions. In this case, the mind obstructs sightlines: either we cannot see around our ways of seeing/understanding, which assumes a tangibility of mind, or we cannot penetrate through the amorphous, invisible shape of our mental constructs, precisely because of their lack of substance, and unlocatability.
The "articulated, indefinite" memory shaft of every man resonates with Dewdney's formulation of experiential memory as "fractionally communicable and chronologically ephemeral." The "articulated, indefinite" shaft also remembers the "indefinite articles" in the lady's purse, and "the shafts / by which we remember" in "The Memory Table I" (p. 19). The shaft, cutting vertically through sedimentary limestone strata, recurs in Dewdney's poetry as a metaphor for the accumulation and stratification of memory. This may partially explain the cryptic presence of a pump developed by winter in a forest clearing in the first stanza of "Glass." {my comment: it is Heidegger’s Lichtung, but extended backward in time through aeons of experience prior to our own but which ours must somehow retain and whose phenomenological meaning becomes pronounced in our evolved consciousness and mind: life and perhaps non-living systems deep in natural evolution have always been aware of and have expressed the interaction of subjective and objective properties in being.}
The second stanza of the poem arrests the mind in the moment of apprehension, by detailing the interaction of mind with world. The mind, though reliant on and interconnected with the brain, exists as a "cavity." Like a fossil, it has no tangible substance, yet is confined to the cranium.25 Almost painfully, the mind exposes itself to the perceptual encoding of experience; the "unimaginable radiation" of sensory data indelibly imprints itself on the mind, as the atomic metaphor suggests. If the focus of the second stanza is steadfastly fixed to a perceptual and mnemonic interior, and the flowers in the external world are "blind," implying a lack of perceptivity, the third stanza abruptly enlarges perceptual horizons by calling attention to the "cold hexagonal fire / in the insect's eye." This eye, endowed with life, presumably has its own, and different, experience of the world. The insect's eye counters the human eye, and opens up another perspectival range within "Glass." The recognition of alternative, non human ways of seeing unbalances the privileging of human perception and consciousness implicit throughout the poem.
"Glass" revolves around the problematics of object knowability as that cognition is regulated by perception. Only the sensory can conduct us to an apprehension of the world; what is beneath is only hinted at because the unassisted eye cannot penetrate to the bottom of the sea, nor, for that matter, can it pierce indefinitely into the cosmos. The limits of perception circumscribe the frontiers of understanding. The glass (an eye? a telescope? a microscope? the mind?) through which we glimpse the world permits cognizance, but that glass also divides us from the objects of our scrutiny, and carefully curbs understanding. . . ."
The Dream of Self: Perception and Consciousness in Dewdney's Poetry
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