In the Metaphysical Streets

It’s strange being back in a city after so many idle days.

I’ve come around to the possibilities of the wide open countryside. The way the countryside has been left behind.

Earlier this year I began forming an interior design consultancy called Shirotec for low energy, low key lifestyles that seeks to uncover “original space.”

I did it because I’m addicted to reality.

Recently, while packing to move to New York City or Miami Beach I found out that I only own one poetry book anymore.

It’s by Wallace Stevens.

It’s called The Palm at the End of the Mind.

While studying interior architecture I found my way to some practices that helped me to understand the ultimate reality.

Roland Barthes talked about this a little bit in The Neutral.

Monks and monastics understand it’s the most high.

I had planned to talk about the Generation X film, River's Edge, before I found this poem by Wallace Stevens that explains the way the world works.

It’s called “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” and it came out in 1950 as part of Stevens’s final poetry book The Auroras of Autumn.

The poem is essentially faded because it’s all background.

And although the poem is totally abstract, Stevens displays an intuitive Zen objectivity.

In this sense, he inhabits an intermediate space that is neither inside nor outside, nowhere and everywhere, a place that is universally inarguable yet pure unmitigated contingency.

It is this aesthetic philosophy, or ground of being, beneath “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.”

Wallace Stevens wrote good beach poems, but years later, when much like Barthes while lecturing on The Neutral, he was near his death, Stevens came to understand that life’s a beach where “We seek // The poem of pure reality…”

I’ve taken great pleasure in the poets I did discover whose work was able to represent some aspect of my personal taste, but I’ve remained reticent about their virtues. For a seemingly flavorful example, once tasted, may not rank as pleasing in intimacy as was so promising in distance.

“An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” requires no such caution.

In my mind it is a paradigmatic poem, so clearly constructed as a poem that it is almost not there. It contains that essential criteria of quality that is so perfected one doesn’t quite know how to complement it.

In this poem Stevens shows us that while the world may not be absolute, it can be perfect.

And that the poem is what it does.

***

By remaining graciously understated and undifferentiated Stevens’s cascading ordinariness masterfully conjures an undivided concentration. The poem, both invulnerable and transparent, is an interpolation between the reader and the unlimited reality on the other side of the text.

In “Mystics and Zen Masters” Thomas Merton advises against seeking the unlimited in a definite place because to do so is to limit it and hence not to find it.

Poetry is always getting in the way of poetry.

“An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” points to a way out of poetry by proposing that

…A more severe,

More harassing master would extemporize
Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory
Of poetry is the theory of life…

Indeed life “as it is” is enough to justify the absence of the text.

Exilic poet Edmond Jabès writes in The Book of Shares, “And words, alas, drive us ever farther from our goal.”

***

I just want to present the poem to you, but I feel driven to explicate its hypertrophic interiority.

Stevens addresses the nature of reality through its relationship to inwardness. He writes of the error of grasping “Reality as a thing seen by the mind, / Not that which is but that which is apprehended,” to remind the reader that we don’t have to do anything to be real. We don’t have to grasp after reality, we don’t even have to think at all.

We can luxuriate in idle days.

When people say things like “Get real” they mean they want you to stop thinking. When rappers rap about being real they’re talking about people who do, people remaining with what is in the moment, not what if in the future.

Likewise, Stevens writes about being

In the metaphysical streets, the profoundest forms
Go with the walker subtly walking there.
These he destroys with wafts of wakening,

Free from their majesty and yet in need
Of majesty, of an invincible clou,
A minimum of making in the mind,

A verity of the most veracious men…

He is plainly cold-blooded in his description of coming awake to the moment, coming alive in the streets like an underground king.

His “minimum of making in the mind” is an indictment of imagination for its own sake.

There is this equation that God is the object, and the object reality.

“God in the object itself…” he writes.

“’The search / For reality is as momentous as / The search for god,’” he quotes.

In “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” this search flows through the self, the interior, the architecture, the gardens, into the urban plan and the town and country. Multiple references to the built environment ground the poet’s search in the body of the Earth—original space.

***

Within the duration of an eternal moment, when we’re in a purer place, all the exquisite moments of our life will come back to us, but without form or conceptualization.

We will realize that life doesn’t have to have meaning. That in fact, life is meaningless.

This is a passage from After Finitude by French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux:

—that we begin to understand that in reply to those metaphysical questions that ask why the world is thus and not otherwise, the response "for no reason" is a genuine answer. Instead of laughing or smiling at questions like "Where do we come from?", "Why do we exist?" we should ponder instead the remarkable fact that the replies "From nothing. For nothing" really are answers, thereby realizing that these really were questions—and excellent ones at that. There is no longer a mystery, not because there is no longer a problem, but because there is no longer a reason.

In other words, the mystery of life is that it’s not a mystery.

We will drink the juice of liberation when we realize that we have no reason to do otherwise.

This is the promise of reality cataloged in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” by the cool master and business person Wallace Stevens.

In part IV he writes, “Reality is the beginning not the end.”

Let us begin with the reality that leisure, doing nothing, is the only authentic response to life because it is the only way to express its accidental truth.

Quote: “…the leisure of blue day”

***

Part XIII describes the ephebe as a bearer of what Stevens names the “fresh spiritual,” defining “A thing on the side of a house, not deep in a cloud.”

The poet unveils the “essential integrity,” his words, the Ultimate, my words, in materiality.

In Stevens’s poem, the Ultimate materializes.

Writing for A+U in 1971 the architect Louis Kahn quoted Stevens, “What slice of sun does your building have?” And then paraphrased Stevens, “What slice of the sun enters your room?”

Upon entering the reception room of his friend, the landscape architect Fernando Caruncho, Belgian interior designer Axel Vervoordt was stunned by what he called “the presence of the void.”

The immaterial materializes.

When discussing the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California Louis Kahn referred to what he called “the presence of the immeasurable.”

As with all texts, we must dispense with the text in order to fully inhabit this vast immaterial space. This dimensionless space.

***

When asked why he talked of architecture as a living thing Louis Khan replied that it was natural for him to give consciousness to a room. He spoke of the dimensions of the room having rapport with its inhabitant, a relationship in which no speaking is involved—just rapport.

It is like this when we inhabit the poem. It is like this when we touch each other.

Stevens wrote a poem that invites us to give consciousness to all poems. He has given us this egress in which to escape the technicality of the text so that we may become integrated with the Ultimate—

from Part XXII

For an interior made exterior
And the poet’s search for the same exterior made
Interior: breathless things broodingly abreath

With the inhalations of original cold
And of original earliness. Yet the sense
Of cold and earliness is a daily sense,

Not the predicate of bright origin.
Creation is not renewed by images
Of lone wanderers. To re-create, to us

The cold and earliness and bright origin
Is to search. Likewise to say of the evening star,
The most ancient light in the most ancient sky,

That it is wholly an inner light, that it shines
From the sleepy bosom of the real, re-creates,
Searches a possible for its possibleness.

Incidentally, it was in New Haven where in 1953 Louis Khan completed his first significant building achievement: the Yale University Art Gallery.

Part VII

In the presence of such chapels and such schools,
The impoverished architects appear to be
Much richer, more fecund, sportive and alive.

The objects tingle and the spectator moves
With the objects. But the spectator also moves
With lesser things, with things exteriorized

Out of rigid realists. It is as if
Men turning into things, as comedy,
Stood, dressed in antic symbols, to display

The truth about themselves, having lost, as things,
That power to conceal they had as men,
Not merely as to depth but as to height

As well, not merely as to the commonplace
But, also, as to their miraculous,
Conceptions of new mornings of new worlds,

The tips of cock-cry pinked out pastily,
As that which was incredible becomes,
In misted contours, credible day again.

***

The poem’s structure is a private practice.

The poem, although monumental, asserts the provisional nature of poetry.

Day breaks upon the poem.

***

pierce the interior with pouring shafts,
in diverse chambers.

Stevens writes in the poem “Architecture.” It is a deliciously erotic image—for architecture and the room.

“So sensitive is a room,” writes Louis Kahn in “The Room, the Street and Human Agreement.”

For Stevens “The sun is half the world, half everything, / The bodiless half…”

The world then is just bodies in the sun.

The repetition: Life’s a beach.

***

I like “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” because Stevens describes the beach with language that is very rich and very controlled.

It is a lush, private, nude beach for venerable aesthetes.

It is a Greek thing.

***

I read the poem “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” and then I tore out my personal favorite “In the Carolinas” and then I threw the book away because I believe in its intention to be the total book and therefore unbound, unattached.

And because I understand Ikkyu, the 15th century Japanese poet and Zen master, when he wrote:

poetry’s hellish bullshit one good way to suffer men love it
men stupid as horses cows

The diamond that cuts through all illusion.

***

When my life lost most of its meaning I watched To the Wonder, a 2012 film by the enigmatic and polarizing, quintessentially American director, Terrence Malick. The film is flooded with natural light. Writing about it for The New Yorker film critic Richard Brody insists, “There is perhaps no film in the history of cinema that reveals such attention to light, which seems to suffuse the space of every frame and to imbue the characters with its moral and spiritual element.”

What I like about Malick is his extraordinary attention to nuance and his ability to expand nuance into the totality of his work, rendering it more than detail, rendering it universal. He encourages us to look deeply into the surface.

In To the Wonder Malick conjures the spacious ordinariness of Stevens’s poem. Light on dialog, it is a highly kinetic film, like the walking poem “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” wherein we aren’t able to grasp any filmic material directly. We’re simply presented with traces of a narrative, lives—a story that move like a brushstroke.

Much of the film is set in a fascinatingly non-descript suburban housing development. Nowhere has this emptiness of emptiness seemed more profound. Each time the golden sunlight hits the grass or floods through the bedroom window it kicks up the religious euphoria another notch.

“All material in nature … are made of Light…” Louis Kahn again.

***

In her book from 1908, The World I Live In, Helen Keller records the sense impressions that set her experience apart from those around her. She describes touch, smell, and taste as guides opening her up to “excursions into the borderland of experience which is in sight of the city of light.”

In these lines we hear the extra-verbal experience described as the edge.

The cutting edge.

Poetry has always claimed to have resort to the unnamable, yet the art form is paradoxically trapped within its attempts to name.

In the post-Internet age, unconstrained by conventional publishing programs and free of traditional models, poetry’s attempt to catalog all existing phenomena across the cultural spectrum only serves to reiterate that poetry is indeed everything; and therefore ordinary.

An echo of Stevens: “The theory of poetry is the theory of life.”

The best poems are the poems that say this succinctly and definitively. “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” is one of these poems.

The real cannot die.

 
 

[Editor's Note: A version of this post was given as a talk at the Poetry Foundation on May 28th, 2015 for the Harriet reading series.]