by Robert Bly
The voices of the wild ducks
turn white.
American haiku poets don’t grasp the idea that the shadow has to have risen up and invaded the haiku poem, otherwise it is not a haiku. The least important thing about it is its seventeen syllables or the nature scene.
The “Harmonium” that Stevens talks of, and wanted, in vain, to use as a title for his Collected Poems, refers to this union of all the five senses, and perhaps of eight or nine more that only Australian hunters or Basho could identify. The serenity that gives music to Stevens’s lines is a mark of the presence of that ancient union of the senses.
It was amazing to me recently to find out that one of his main helpers in this effort was William James. We ordinarily think of the senses and thought as opposites, so we assume that if one wants to reawaken the senses, one must stop thinking. When I first read Harmonium I was surprised to see that the thinking is expressed through odor and sound images, and the sense images become more intense through the thinking going on. What I didn’t know is that the thinking is of the sort recommended by William James. Margaret Peterson set all that out in a spirited essay printed in Southern Review’s Stevens issue, Summer 1971. It turns out that some of the most enigmatic and vivid poems in Harmonium are rephrasings of paragraphs by James. How unpredictable it all is!
William James warned his students that a certain kind of mind-set was approaching the West—it could hardly be called a way of thought—in which no physical details are noticed. Fingernails are not noticed, trees in the plural are mentioned, but no particular tree is ever loved, nor where it stands; the hair in the ear is not noticed. We now see this mind-set spread all over freshman English papers, which American students can now write quickly, on utterly generalized subjects; the nouns are usually plurals, and the feelings are all ones it would be nice to have. The same mind-set turns up on the Watergate tapes, and working now with more elaborate generalizations, in graduate seminars in English, in which all the details in Yeats’s poems turn out to be archetypes or Irish Renaissance themes. It is the lingua franca, replacing Latin. The mind-set could be described as the ability to talk of Africa without visualizing the hair in a baboon’s ear, or even a baboon. Instead the mind-set reports “wild animals.” Since the immense range of color belongs to physical detail—the thatness—of the universe, it is the inability to see color. People with this mind-set have minds that resemble white nightgowns. For people with this mind-set, there’s not much difference between 3 and 742; the count of something is a detail. In fact the number they are most interested in, as James noted, is one. That’s a number without physical detail. As I read Peterson’s essay, I was amazed to see “Metaphors of a Magnifico,” which I had always loved as a zany poem of high spirits, become a serious process poem. The poem describes how to begin to free yourself from this mind-set; how to avoid being murdered by it. (So Ph.D.’s on Harmonium are especially funny.) He begins:
Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
Into twenty villages,
Or one man
Crossing a single bridge into a village.
He knows he is beginning by singing the sad little song hummed by Ph.D. candidates and politicians and experts in government planning: “One thing equals another thing.”
This is old song
That will not declare itself…
Then he says what to do. Stop juggling ideas. Go to this place with your body, bring the senses forward, sound first, then sight, then smell if possible. Ask your imagination to bring you the sound:
The boots of the men clump
On the boards of the bridge.
The first white wall of the village
Rises through fruit-trees.
Of what was it I was thinking?
So the meaning escapes.
The first white wall of the village…
The fruit-trees…
How strange! It is a Purgatory poem, laying out a road, a sort of guru poem. How beautiful!
William James observed the approaching mind-set and associated out from it sideways. He noticed the mind-set resembled the upper class of Boston. They too disliked the sordid details—the hair in the ear of religion, the smells of the Irish entryway—and preferred the religion of the One. Naturally, they became Unitarians. If the “cultured people” move into this mind-set, a curious thing happens: the upper (spiritual) half of life and the lower (sensual) half of life begin to part company. One part ascends; the other part, no longer connected to the high, sinks. The gaps between grow wider and wider. The educated class has the Pure One, the working class people are left with nothing but the crude physical details of their lives—the husband’s old pipe and the spit knocked out of it, the washing tub, the water and slush from the children’s boots on the entry floor, the corns on the feet, the mess of dishes in the sink, the secular love-making in the cold room. These physical details are now, in the twentieth century, not only unpenetrated by religion, but they somehow prove to the unconscious that “religion is a nullity.” James emphasized that perception, and Stevens grieved over the insight all his life. For the working class there’s nothing left but the Emperor of Ice Cream. The middle class is now the working class, and so the majority of people in the West are worse off than they were in the Middle Ages.
James also noticed that the presence of this mind-set in India explains why certain Vedanta philosophies are so boring. An Indian meditation teacher, working with Ananda Marga, told me recently that before he did any meditation at all himself, and while he was working as an engineer in a compressor factory in India, he would at night visit the meeting of whatever holy man was in town. After the talk, he would ask the man, from the audience: What is the relation of your path to the poor in India? Usually—I think he said invariably—ten or twelve times in a row—two husky-looking men would come back and escort him out of the hall. Stevens would have understood that. For most holy men in India, the poor are the hair in the ear of India. They prefer the One, who has no hair.
James made sure his students understood a third sideways association, namely, the link of the mind-set to the German idealists. They were represented in England by Bradley and in the United States by Josiah Royce and the Anglo-Hegelians—horrible types, specialists in the One, builders of middle-class castles, and upper-class Usher houses, writers of boring Commencement speeches, creepy otherworldly types, worse than Pope Paul, academics who resembled gray jars, and who would ruin a whole state like Tennessee if put into it; people totally unable to merge into the place where they live—they could live in a valley for years and never become the valley. Antonio Machado, who did all his academic work in philosophy, describes them also:
Everywhere I’ve gone I’ve seen
excursions of sadness,
angry and melancholy
drunkards with black shadows,
and academics in offstage clothes
who watch, say nothing, and think
they know, because they do not drink wine
in the ordinary bars.
Evil men who walk around
polluting the earth…
Machado also remarked:
Mankind owns four things
that are no good at sea:
rudder, anchor, oars,
and the fear of going down.
If we think of the idealists in terms of Jung’s speculations about the shadow, it’s clear the idealist is a man or woman who does not want to go down. They plan to go to the grave with the shadow still repressed. The idealists are shadow-haters. They all end as does Dr. Jekyll, with a monkey-like Mr. Hyde scurrying among back buildings elsewhere in the city.
By exclusive interest in “the truth,” they exile the shadow, or keep it exiled…When Stevens takes his stand against all that, he takes a stand against perfect Paradises, against abstract churches, against the statistical mentality, against too easy transcendentalizing, too easy ignoring of t
he tragic:
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
Stevens did not make Dimmesdale’s mistake. He invited the feminine in; Florida, the moon, convolvulus and coral, glade-boats, sombreros, the soles of feet and grape leaves, cabins in Carolina, and so much sound!
Only the shadow understands the ecstasy of sound. You know the shadow has found a way for part of it to return when you hear the joyful and primitive music of Vincentine, as energetic as Mozart, as insistent as Australian drums:
Yes: you came walking,
Vincentine.
Yes: you came talking.
And what I knew you felt
Came then.
Monotonous earth I saw become
Illimitable spheres of you,
And that white animal, so lean,
Turned Vincentine,
Turned heavenly Vincentine,
And that white animal, so lean,
Turned heavenly, heavenly Vincentine.
So Stevens learned how to go home. He learned that the idealist-Christian-Hebraic insistence that there is one truth is all that is needed to block the shadow from rising forever, for a human being, with his frail psychic processes, so easily altered or ground to a stop. He wrote the clear and sweet poem, “On The Way Home”:
It was when I said,
“There is no such thing as the truth,”
That the grapes seemed fatter.
The fox ran out of his hole.
You…You said,
“There are many truths,
But they are not parts of a truth.”
Then the tree, at night, began to change,
Smoking through green and smoking blue.
We were two figures in a wood.
We said we stood alone.
It was when I said,
“Words are not forms of a single word.
In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.
The world must be measured by eye”;
It was when you said,
“The idols have seen lots of poverty,
Snakes and gold and lice,
But not the truth”;
It was at that time, that the silence was largest
And longest, the night was roundest,
The fragrance of the autumn warmest,
Closest and strongest.
After writing such a masterpiece as Harmonium, guided by the secret knowledge James offered him in his books, and walking the path—he knew he was walking it—why then is there no more to the story?
Sometimes we look to the end of the tale
where there should be marriage feasts,
and find only, as it were,
black marigolds and a silence.
Critics usually accept the world the poet creates. If he says east is north, they say: Why didn’t I think of that before! So Stevens’s critics on the whole see constant development in his work, in a chosen direction. But it’s not so. The late poems are as weak as is possible for a genius to write; what is worse, most of them have the white nightgown mentality.
There are some good poems, but somehow there are no further marriages in his work. Yeats’s work picked up more and more detail as it went on, the sensual shadow began to rise, the instinctual energy throws off its own clown clothes and fills more and more of the consciousness.
Why that did not happen to Stevens I don’t know for sure, but I think we have to look to his life for an explanation. Boehme has a note before one of his books, in which he asks the reader not to go farther and read the book unless he is willing to make practical changes as a result of the reading. Otherwise, Boehme says, reading the book will be bad for him, dangerous. We have the sense that Wallace Stevens’s relation to the shadow followed a pattern that has since become familiar among American artists: he brings the shadow into his art, but makes no changes in the way he lives. The European artists—at least Yeats, Tolstoy, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Rilke—seem to understand better that the shadow has to be lived too, as well as accepted in the work of art. The implication of all their art is that each time a man or woman succeeds in making a line so rich and alive with the senses, as full of darkness as:
quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries
he must from then on live differently. A change in his life has to come as a response to the change in his language. Rilke’s work moves on, shifting to deeper and deeper marriages, over wider and wider arcs, and we notice that he was always ready to change his way of living at a moment’s notice if the art told him to. He looked one day at a statue for a long time, an old statue centered around ecstatic Apollonianism, and saw that the shape was alive not only in the head parts, but in every square inch of the body, throughout the chest and stomach, all of which dived down toward the genitals: every inch is looking at you, he said. Out of that he drew the conclusion that by tomorrow morning he would have to make some changes in the way he lived. I recall teachers at college laughing at Yeats for a remark he made in his journal during his twenties, something like: It seems to me my rhythms are becoming slack; I think I had better sleep on a board for a while. But that says the same thing as Rilke’s poem.
Wallace Stevens was not willing to change his way of life, despite all the gifts he received, and all the advice he read in his own poems. He kept the house fanatically neat, evidently slept in a separate bedroom for thirty or forty years, made his living through the statistical mentality, and kept his business life and poetry life separate—all of which amounted to keeping his dominant personality and his shadow personality separate in his daily life. That was so much true that when he took a literary visitor to his club to eat, it seems Stevens entered and conversed there as a businessman, and warned visitors against eccentric behavior. In 1935, during Mussolini’s attack on Ethiopia, when Stevens was 56, he wrote in a letter to Ronald Latimer:
The Italians have as much right to take Ethiopia from the coons as the coons had to take it from the boa-constrictors.
This sentence was intended to be playful, in part at least, and it does not represent a crime that has to be laid to him. And yet it is a sentence that everyone who loves Stevens’s poems has to face sooner or later. It seems to indicate that he was not living his shadow very intensely. He had urged the shadow energies to enter Harmonium, but at the point where they might have disturbed the even tenor of his life, or the opinions appropriate to it, he shut the door.
I realize that making serious comment on a group of poems by mentioning details of the author’s life violates every canon of New Criticism, canons still very much alive. But surely we must see now that this critical insistence on examining only the work is another example of shadow-hatred and shadow-ignoring. It is an idealist position. William James’s and Stevens’s warning on the mind-set were rejected, and by the 1940s the idealist position in literature was established, and all of us who began to write in the ’40s and ’50s felt that fact keenly. The critic’s assumption was that the author’s life had no bearing whatever on the poem. Eliot helped to bring that attitude about, yet I heard him complain in a hockey stadium in St. Paul around 1957 that one of his poems had recently appeared in an anthology holding eight long poems, and that nothing whatever was said about the authors of the poems—their nationality was not given, nor the century in which they had lived. “They were all dead except me, and opening the book made me feel dead too.” The mentality of the anthologist was exactly what Stevens called the mentality of the white nightgown. In any case, by 1950 the idealist position had found a good home in literary criticism, and none of us writing then got much help from it on how to bring our own shadows—or the national shadow—into our poems.
Wallace Stevens’s statement at the club—don’t talk too much about poetry, or too wildly—is somehow the opposite of Tolstoy, who, when he got ready in his old age to free his serfs, found
to his amazement that his wife and two of his daughters were ready for no such thing, but considered them part of the property and dowry, and that was an end of it. He left the house in a blizzard with his youngest daughter, Alexandra, and died in a railway station shortly after. He was willing to change his way of life that late!
That story is probably a bad example, because it implies that changing your way of life involves sensational events, catastrophes, turmoil, leaving wife and children, leaving husband and children, slamming the door in the Ibsen manner. The contrary seems to be true. Enormous changes—divorce, throwing away children, abandoning responsibilities, look to be clear ways to join your shadow again, but oddly that doesn’t happen most of the time. When a person divorces, he or she usually sets up a similar life with a different person. All the verbal storms of confessional poetry that the poets and readers have gone through in the last years did not achieve anything for the poet—the poet’s shadow is still miles away after the confessional book is written. As Plath’s and Sexton’s and Berryman’s lives made clear, nothing has happened at all, and the death energy is still waiting to pounce on the unintegrated soul.