"The trouble with you, Robert, is that you write about subjects."

"The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about bric-a-brac."

Or so the story goes about the infamous quarrel between Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost.  I, like many of my class mates, have been struggling with Stevens.  This is in part due to his obscurity; but this is one of the things I've come to appreciate about Stevens.  What I hate about Stevens is his obsessive insistence that beauty is bound only to this physical realm.  I do not mean to argue a case for the superiority of the metaphysical, for I do not believe it to be either more eminent or more relevant than the physical.  The mind becomes just as vexed and exhausted by the sentimental pining for the abstract as it is dulled by the constant inundation of concrete things in the concrete world. Perhaps this is why we sleep, to escape, and perhaps this is why we dream when we sleep.  To be in that world, filled both with specters of everyday life and non-cognizant chimeras is to be subliminally reconciled to one within body and mind.  Not all of our dreams are pleasant, just as not all of our experiences in the physical world are unpleasant.  That is the paradox of life, and we must learn to live within this paradox.  That is why I am not hostile toward religion, even though I am not religious.  It provides something deeper, that cure of the mind, which I do not believe can be found only in poetry.

 Last week I was talking with Biz about personal suffering borne from the deaths of others.  The conversation meandered along several paths, coming to a discussion of feelings versus emotions.  We thought that emotions are perhaps deeper than feelings, denoting the difference between sorrow and sadness, or joy and happiness.  To be joyful is something different than merely feeling happy.  I may find happiness in a new pair of jeans that fits well, or a new tube of lip gloss; but I find joy in my love for my children.  It is something inexplicable.  Of course I love my children--most normal parents do.  But when I really think about it I am not able to reduce the truth of it to something tangible and existing in the world.  I am sad for them as they are saddened by fights with friends or the death of a baby bird that fell out of its nest, but the terrible and ever present fear of the possibility of their loss provokes sorrow.  Of course, worry over something that hasn't happened is irrational, but it would be an absolute lie to say that the thought crosses my mind only occasionally.  Besides, the imagination is irrational and it is foolish to set forth that it functions only to produce positive effects.

This is why we need that cure of the mind, the subject of which came up while discussing my ambivalence toward Stevens with Eli.  He said the reason I didn't like some of the poems is probably because they don't lend a cure for my mind when it is troubled.  So maybe sometimes to be merely poetry is not enough, to look for beauty solely in the world around us is not enough.  I think Stevens is just as aware of this as I am; indeed he has known it far longer than I have, for he says so in canto VIII of "It Must Give Pleasure."  It all comes together here for me, but not necessarily in the way that my sentimental selves would have liked.  Though it does provide a cure for my mind in one respect, in another it shatters all my secret illusions.

What am I to believe?  If the angel in his cloud,
Serenely gazing at the violet abyss,
Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory,

Leaps downward through the evening's revelations, and
On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,
Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny,

Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight,
Am I that imagine this angel less satisfied?
Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?

Is it he or is it I that experience this?
Is it I then that keep saying there is an hour
Filled wit expressible bliss, in which I have

No need, am happy, forget need's golden hand,
Am satisfied without solacing majesty,
And if there is an hour there is a day,

There is a month, a year, there is a time
In which majesty is a mirror of the self:
I have not but I am and as I am, I am.

These external regions, what do we fill them with
Except reflections, the escapades of death,
Cinderella fulfilling herself beneath the roof?

If a poem is not the cure of the mind, it is because it never claimed to be.  And the reason I hate the poem is because it hates me, just as some of my selves hate the others and vice versa.  What, then, are we to do when faced with that awful truth, when we must stand between two glasses and see that they are not dark, and see all of ourselves behind and beyond?

Sometimes I need a little Robert Frost to stir up my Stevens.  Or maybe it's the other way around.

"And so Frost, who wanted 'to get away from earth awhile/ And then come back to it and begin over,' and Stevens, for whom 'Reality is the beginning not the end,' would share sapodillas and conch chowder but remain isolated from one another's poetry, in which was the other's only peer."--Arlo Haskell
Quote taken from    www.kwls.org/littoral/post_11/