And I was scared like I was as a child...

Domination of Black    

Wallace Stevens

At night, by the fire, 
The colors of the bushes 

And of the fallen leaves, 
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes:  but the color of he heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry--the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in their fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.



As I thumbed through our Bible the other night looking for "The Snow Man"  I stumbled upon this poem printed just before it in chronological order.  The title drew my eyes further downward and I was instantly transfixed by its cadence and images.  I read it a second, and even a third, fourth, and fifth time.  It is one of my favorite pieces.  In class I noticed that it was included in the collection of Stevens' poems for children that Dr. S passed around.  I thought this odd, for it did not at first seem to be a suitable poem for children; but as I read it again, I realized that my internal narrator's voice was that of a child.  The brief explanation provided by the children's edition stated that when Stevens was asked what the poem meant, he merely shrugged and said something to the effect of, "I just wanted the reader to be filled with its images" (paraphrased).

Later that night, as I thrummed on that threshold between awake and sleep, I thought of the swerve.  The swerve is what creates being and consciousness, and therefore reality; but wouldn't the particles falling through the void be the true reality?  So which reality is really real?  The void? Or our illusions as result of the swerve?  Oranges and apples.  Snorting bucks and firecats.

I dreamed of having to be evacuated along with my parents and grandmother because of the forest fires.  I was scared like I would have been if I were still a child.  Earlier there was an unusually illustrious thunderstorm, and the lightening must have been striking very close.  I never saw any of it, but the thunder was louder than any I have heard in recent memory.  My children weren't with me; they are not here with me now.  They are safe in Wyoming, where only one fire presently burns near them.  But I wanted them with me so that I could lay my eyes upon them and know for sure they were not in danger.  We drove down Cobb Hill; we passed the burnt out shell of a truck.  We turned off Cobb Hill, and my dad took a secret back road to avoid the panicked rush of all the other evacuees.

I woke in the dark at 2:44 a.m.  I was filled with the images of Wallace's poem.  I went to the door and looked through the glass, looked in fear of the fires.  But it had rained sometime during my dream.  It had rained enough to soak the old piece of particle board outside the side door of my grandma's house.  It rained enough that the raspberry bushes outside my bedroom window glistened in the night.  And I was no longer afraid.

I am enchanted by Kant's musings on the beautiful and the sublime.  He says that the sublime is something "lofty," as in something higher or beyond us.  "The sublime moves," he writes, "the expression of a person experiencing the full sense of the sublime is serious, at times rigid and amazed."  And, "The sublime...is at times accompanied by some terror or melancholia...."  Or, "A very great height is sublime as well as a very great depth; but the later is accompanied by the sense of terror, the former by admiration."  It does not exist in nature he says, but in our minds.  It's how we perceive those things even our imaginations cannot fully fathom.  It is that threshold between reality and imagination of Steven's poetry that he has so expertly woven with his images.




And so I shall depart with the words of yet another German philosopher, words that have long tumbled round my mind and have resurfaced, borne by the upheaval of this poem's images.

"And when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you."
                                                     Nietzsche

 All quotes taken from WisdomPortal.com; ed. Peter Y. Chou